Reviews

  • Dark City (1950)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2022) As far as film noir goes, it’s hard to find a more iconic title as “Dark City,” which seems to encapsulate the mood that the entire subgenre was going for. But Dark City is less impressive as a movie—it eventually negotiates itself a place in the middle-tier noir filmography but can’t do much with a diffuse script that doesn’t know how to focus. The one big attraction of the film is probably Charlton Heston in one of his first big film roles, playing a hustler whose greed puts terrible things in motion. Probably the biggest structural issue with Dark City is that it scatters itself across too long a period and (ironically) over several cities in skipping from Los Angeles to Las Vegas—much of the same material (with an unseen vigilante taking out hoodlums who swindled his brother) would have been far more powerful if compressed over a much smaller period of time and space. Absent that, however, viewers can find some comfort in Heston’s performance, in the film’s gloomy dark atmosphere and moody cinematography—while Dark City doesn’t become anything special, it does nail the basics and that’s almost good enough.

  • The Frozen Dead (1966)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2022) The corpus of zombie-Nazi movies has at least one more film than I expected, and The Frozen Dead does have the added interest of coming from the mid-1960s, well before Romero defined the zombie genre. It features Dana Andrews (in a late-career performance prefiguring what other Classic Hollywood stars would do for a paycheque in the 1970s) as a mad Nazi scientist—as if there was any other kind—working twenty years after the war to resurrect 1,500 frozen Nazis to revive the Third Reich. (Our history shows that it would have been far more efficient for him to create a hard-right cable TV news channel, but I digress.)  Much of The Frozen Dead is cheap and laughable—the sets are about as convincing as a high school play, the contrivances run sky-high and the writing is clunky. But there are some moments of poignancy as well—most of them focused on an innocent young girl who gets decapitated but kept alive, and provides the film with a surprisingly effective closing tag. Still, that surprisingly effective element seems overwrought for such a silly film—and the rest of it is close to a snooze. With writer-director-producer Herbert J. Leder clearly operating from an unbuilt trope, the film doesn’t quite seem to know what to do with Nazi zombies—it has a few lulls, especially when it doesn’t seem to want to go any further than the elements strictly essential to the plot. Keep your expectations low: The Frozen Dead remains a disappointment, even if it has a few things going for it.

  • Visitors of the Night (1995)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, July 2022) Many basic film viewers will often recoil at the thought of “an old movie, ugh!”, but for others, the age of a movie is its point—it may not be all that original or well made, but if it can exemplify the flavour of its time, a film can justify its existence as a capture of something very specific. There’s little doubt that Visitors of the Night (1995) is a terrible film: it plays X-Files era alien-abduction clichés as straight as possible, all the way to the Grey aliens of folklore. Much of the plot has to do with a mother (Markie Post) noticing an accumulation of eerie details about her small town, and suspecting that her daughter (Candace Cameron) may have been the product of an alien abduction. But hold on to your horses if you think this is going to be interesting, because the execution of this made-for-TV film is about as dull and generic as can be—even the two lead actresses seem to have been extruded from a 1990s central casting cloning agency. Elements of UFO lore are remixed without wit and executed with mediocre special effects. Much of the non-alien plot seems lifted from movies of the week about divorced moms thinking that their teenage kids are doing drugs. It’s really not that good, not interesting, not entertaining at all—but if you want an undiluted blend of 1990s parenting fears and alien hysteria, Visitors of the Night is where to go.

  • Stranger on the Third Floor (1940)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2022) Often hailed as one of the first true noir films due to its 1940 release date, stylized visuals, urban crime plot and half-nightmarish interludes, Stranger on the Third Floor indeed feels closer to the subgenre than some of the noir films from the post-war era. John McGuire plays a newspaper reporter haunted by the idea that his testimony helping to convict a man of murder may have been erroneous. When he decides to investigate, trouble spirals up. The link between German expressionism and noir is made clear here, and further reinforced by having Peter Lorre play the villain of the film. A touch too much voice-over narration makes the film less self-assured than it could have been, but otherwise Stranger on the Third Floor offers thrills almost custom-made for noir fans. An essential piece of film noir history for those interested in the genre—and a decent thriller for everyone else.

  • The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, July 2022) As an unprecedented heat wave sweeps through Europe, breaking records (40c in London!) and killing thousands, it seems appropriate that movie channels would unearth Night of the Big Heat, a British “cozy catastrophe” film describing the global upheaval when temperatures rise and keep rising. Of course, part of the film’s comfort is in knowing that its version of climate change was caused by nuclear explosions, and that another series of explosions may fix the problem. The film takes place in those last days before the corrective explosions, as employees of a major London newspaper undergo personal crises and witness what may be the end of civilization. The coziness of this catastrophe film comes from the stiff upper lip of the British characters as they go about their business and their lives awaiting the end. The ending is strictly dignified as well, offering nothing more than interior shots of people reacting to the events rather than theatrics, and ending on a note of ambiguity that still allows for some hope. The cinematography is rather good (with special recognition of the film’s orange-red beginning and closing sequences) and the dialogue occasionally has some bite to it—crucial considering how much of the film focuses on interactions between characters rather than save-the-world heroics. I was pleasantly surprised by The Day the Earth Caught Fire—it’s an unusually adult end-of-the-world film, and it’s got plenty of good moments to make up for the very slow-paced nature of its story choices. Writer-director Val Guest clearly knows what he’s doing here, and the result still speaks for itself sixty years later as the planet continues to boil itself.

  • Last Night in Soho (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2022) On paper, Last Night in Soho doesn’t sound all that promising, but if any filmmaker has earned my automatic interest, it’s writer-director Edgar Wright: His sense of cinema is close enough to mine that whatever he does is worth watching as far as I’m concerned, with no prior questions asked. Of course, that doesn’t mean I’m not going to ask questions during or after the film. Last Night in Soho is clearly an outlier in his filmography so far: slower paced, slightly more sedate, more leisurely edited and not quite as humorous as his previous films, it also features female protagonists and goes back in time for its topic matter. Much of the story revolves around a modern-day young woman (Thomasin McKenzie) coming to London to study fashion—but spending her nights in unusually immersive dreams that follow another young woman (Anya Taylor-Joy) in late-1960s London, as she too comes to the city with big dreams. The first half-hour of Last Night in Soho climaxes in a gorgeous historical re-creation of the glitz and glamour of the Swingin’ Sixties, executed with as much slickness as modern filmmaking allows. But this being a 2021 film, nothing stays fun for a long time: Much of the second act follows the historical heroine’s descent into prostitution as dreams are dashed, men take advantage of her and the glamour of nostalgia cracks under examination. The film burns through this plotline midway through, turning its attention to the modern echoes of these past events. The ghost story aspect of the tale comes across more clearly in an unexpected fashion, bringing the film back to genre material more familiar to Wright. It wraps up with an incendiary climax that should satisfy most of his fans. This being said, I have a number of issues with the film’s ultimate message that prostitution justifies mass murder as long as the victims are middle-aged white men, but that’s almost the default message of far too many movies these days, so I should just note and move on. What’s more impressive are the performances of the two young pleads, plus a deliciously villainous turn by Matt Smith and a decent last turn from Diana Rigg. In the end, the final result justifies continued sight-unseen interest in Wright’s next work: the slick polish of the film, its genre-blending plotting and ability to create interest where other filmmakers would stumble ensure that, even if Last Night in Soho is nowhere near his best work, it’s still a demonstration of skill from an engaging filmmaker. [May 2026: Harumph. Weirdly enough, I’m feeling a lot less positive about Last Night in Soho and Edgar Wright in general these days. His take on The Running Man was mediocre, and now I’m thinking that maybe even Baby Driver wasn’t all that. Not everyone keeps the “no prior questions asked” status.]

  • Night of the Big Heat (1967)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, July 2022) Surely the timing of Night of the Big Heat being shown on cable movie channels isn’t an accident—as temperatures across Great Britain reached a record-setting 40 degrees earlier this month, here is a film about a British island experiencing stifling temperatures in the middle of winter. What will comfort everyone is that the film’s high temperatures aren’t the result of anthropogenic climate change, but ALIENS (!) doing a bit of local terraforming prior to invasion. (If that’s familiar, you probably saw 1996’s The Arrival.) Fortunately, we’ve got Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing on hand to fight the impending invasion, in between a little bit of small-scale drama between the lead character, his wife and his ex-mistress freshly arrived on the island. (Jane Merrow looks terrific as the ex-mistress, despite the role being… problematic for modern audiences.)  Unfortunately, everything I’ve just said will probably make Night of the Big Heat sound like a much better film than it is. Even by the standards of 1960s British Science Fiction, this one is limp. Despite the good atmosphere of an unbearably hot night, the script struggles to make the most out of its premise. The romantic material is not only a distraction, but one that creates many vexing questions for twenty-first century viewers. Meanwhile, the progression of the plotting is disappointing and the film closes on a surprisingly underwhelming climax. Too bad—but fans of the lead actors will appreciate anyway.

  • Solomon Northrup’s Odyssey (1984)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2022) As much as I hailed 12 Years a Slave, it’s a useful footnote to know that Solomon Northrup’s Odyssey adapted, nearly thirty years earlier, the very same book describing how a skilled black man from New York State was lured, captured and sent in slavery for twelve years. This made-for-PBS telefilm was directed by none other than Gordon Parks, shot in the American South and was informed by several historians. It goes without saying that the material here isn’t quite as hard-hitting as Steve McQueen’s 2012 film—but for a TV audience, it’s eloquent enough and sometimes a bit more interesting in how it portrays slavery under three different masters, yet maintains the point of slavery’s inherent brutality. Park’s background as a photographer shows in the film’s better-than-average cinematography, and Avery Brooks does quite well as Northrup. It strikes me that this 1984 version could be used more widely in classrooms than the often-brutal 2012 film—but it’s well worth visiting for anyone. (One of the modern tragedies of slavery is that when it’s taught in schools, it often becomes a received subject without immersion in the real horrors of what it means to belong to someone else—emotional dives such as this movie make it all real far more real.)  It’s unfortunate that the film’s lower audiovisual quality persists today (even on TCM, which presumably has access to the highest-quality-available version), and that it’s practically forgotten by anyone without an interest in black cinema. I found it engrossing, especially when compared to the better-known version of the same story.

  • 5 Against the House (1955)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2022) There are some interesting parallels to be made between 5 Against the House and Ocean’s Eleven five years later—both are about a few buddies teaming up to rob a casino, but it’s the differences that make them worth a comparison. Clearly, the group here isn’t the charismatic rat-packers playing WW2 veterans—they’re young students (albeit on the GI Bill, some of them Korea veterans), two of them newlyweds, who don’t go for greed as much as they approach casino robbing as an intellectual exercise that gets out of hand. Ocean’s Eleven has cool characters—but the plot of 5 Against the House depends on one member of the group being disturbed by severe PTSD and escalating an intellectual exercise into a real robbery, threatening the others into executing the plan. Taking place in Reno also lends the film a different feel from the overdone Vegas extravaganza—the sense of place heightened by numerous sequences being shot on location. An interesting cast also populates the film—Kim Novak has one of her first turns here, with Brian Keith playing the disturbed heavy and Guy Madison as the male lead. There is a bit of a lull in the middle and the ending’s intention to play nice is shackled to a bit of an anticlimax if you see 5 Against the House as a strict genre exercise, but maybe that’s another crucial difference between this early casino heist picture and its successor.

  • Blood Red Sky (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix Streaming, July 2022) On paper, Blood Red Sky should work much better than it does in reality—after all, what’s not to like about an airplane thriller in which terrorists see their plans foiled by the unexpected appearance of a vampire on the passenger manifest? As far as good old genre premises go, this one is pretty good. This German import (via Netflix) even has the budget required to do justice to most of its invention, and the terrific opening sequence (a modern airborne update on the classic boat arrival of Dracula in Stoker’s original) sets an intriguing tone. Alas (and it would be tempting to make a link here with its German origins), the film is almost absurdly over-the-top serious and tragic. In making sure its vampire is a tragic heroic figure, Blood Red Sky paints itself in a corner in terms of fun. (It also makes things a bit too convoluted by dancing inconclusively around the idea of making its hijackers terrorists, instead going for something more nebulous that doesn’t improve anything.)  In other words—this is the kind of fun genre thriller that ends up being a not-fun ordeal. Its 121 minutes running time is absurdly overlong, especially considering that the film essentially takes place in a tin can (there’s a little bit on the ground and a few flashbacks, but they only underscore the point). The cinematography is drab and the set-pieces are fewer than you’d imagine. It seems like an error for writer-director Peter Thorwarth to play up a mother/son emotional plotline when there’s so much fun left on the table. But there’s the problem: for a sealed-environment terrorists-versus-vampires genre exercise, Blood Red Sky leaves viewers unmoved—no chuckles, no fist-pumping victories, no “I can’t believe this” moments. Just the most ordinary execution of a promising idea.

  • Don’t Breathe 2 (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Amazon Streaming, July 2022) There was really no need to do a follow-up to Don’t Breathe—the film was self-contained enough that the only remaining direction for a sequel was inherently distasteful: more glorification of a serial kidnapper/murderer. Stephen Lang, to be fair, is quite good as the blind ex-veteran who somehow ended up as the star of this two-film thriller/horror series. But I’ve had enough with glorifying killers, abusers and kidnappers and Don’t Breathe 2 merely doubles down on all of that with a side of absolution. It’s a film that doesn’t really attach itself to the real world—everything takes place in nighttime, in run-down places away from the rest of civilization and featuring a variety of horrible people. Some of the plot has to do with the Blind Man’s abducted “daughter” rediscovering her lost parents, but there’s nothing remotely uplifting about the reasons why they want her back and the unrelenting grimness eventually takes its toll. While handsomely photographed and directed by Rodo Sayagues, the film feels morally bankrupt and consequently of very little interest. Useless and ugly, Don’t Breathe 2 may yet do worse and lead to a third instalment. But let’s hope not.

  • Jubilee (1978)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2022) One of the worst things I can say about a film is that it smells—a pejorative usually applied to movies that seem to take place in grimy run-down surroundings, with characters that look not only as if they haven’t taken a bath, but as busy plotting the downfall of civilization so that no one else can either. A lot of films revolving around post-May 68 student uprisings feel this way, and a surprising number of punk band movies as well. It also applies to Jubilee, but I’m not sure the writer-director Derek Jarman would consider “smelling” to be a criticism. It’s a weird movie like that—the plot begins with Queen Elizabeth (the first) time-travelling to 1970s London after the strangling of Queen Elizabeth II by a crown-stealing street hooligan. Much more violence follows, but not necessarily a plot—our punk characters merrily murder each other in run-down surroundings but can’t sustain a plot for more than a single scene. Clearly designed to freak the mundanes, Jubilee is far more avant-garde than narrative-oriented. Even to 2022 audiences, the characters are extreme, aimless and nihilistic in their casual violence. But the result is not provocative—it’s a mess that dulls itself in exasperating nonsense. I get that observers of the late-1970s British punk scene will get a lot more than others from Jubilee, but I suspect that many viewers (and not necessarily only the squares) will roll their eyes and move on. Yes, it’s supposed to be a satire, but still. There’s admittedly something intriguing in using Elizabeth I as a viewpoint character to the evolution of British society… but not in this way. (Although Jack Birkett, credited as Orlando, is magnificent here as an aristocrat of sorts.) Jubilee feels grimy simply by watching it—and as I’ve said, I can only imagine what it smelled.

  • The Muppet Movie (1979)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Disney Streaming, July 2022) Essentially, The Muppet Movie is nothing more than your standard road trip to Hollywood movie, with a green frog gathering friends on his way to fame and fortune. But, of course, plot is the farthest thing away from viewers’ minds as they watch the film: the focus here is on gags, characters and cameos. How has it aged in forty years? Badly in the details, not at all in the aggregate. Much of the material is completely timeless—the Muppets are the Muppets, and there’s bound to be one in the bunch that you like. It does help that the level of humour here remains basic most of the time—time-tested material accessible to multiple generations, never too out-there but often more than the lowest level. Even the meta-fictional material, with a framing device that has the Muppets watching their own movie, is gently introduced. What has not aged so well are the cameos, which often depend on an encyclopedic knowledge of circa-1979 pop culture. Some familiar faces still make an impression (Steve Martin, Richard Pryor, and Orson Welles in a delicious one-line cameo), while others will require some more context (Dom DeLuise, Telly Savalas, Elliott Gould, Bob Hope, etc.) and others are just about obscure by now. Also notable are some of the special effects required to show full-body Muppets interacting with the world. But little of those issues matter when the film by itself is just a warm bath of fun and comfort: The Muppets Movie remains funny all the way to the big-smash ending, and there’s something immensely reassuring knowing that it still finds fans even today.

  • Phenomenon (1996)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Disney Streaming, July 2022) The only thing more entertaining than a big-budget film doing things right is a big-budget film doing things… badly. In Phenomenon’s case, it means smashing two movies together, wallowing in weird middle-America notions of intelligence, and going for tragedy when the bag of ideas runs dry. John Travolta stars as a semi-rural everyman who, after seeing a strange light in the sky, suddenly finds himself hyper-intelligent—absorbing knowledge like a sponge, coming up with new theories and inventions, easily mastering multiple disciplines and languages, predicting earthquakes, and eventually developing telekinesis (what?) as a bonus. Despite some egregious shortcuts in describing magical levels of intelligence, the first half of Phenomenon does have its charm in the idea of a world-class genius turning his attention to mundane pursuits of interest to a North California town and its inhabitants. There isn’t a lot of friction in this first half, with caricatural evil government workers out of the picture and no one having turned on the protagonist yet. But the script, sadly, isn’t done—and before long, the usual weird conspiracy theories about the American government rear their head up and our protagonist is kidnapped for study. This doesn’t last a long time, however, and before long the usual amount of anti-intellectualism shows up to teach the protagonist not to get too big for the town’s undersized britches. Still lacking a third act, the film then turns to the ultimate humbling of its protagonist: A fatal tumour turns Phenomenon into an attempted weeper. Except that, by this time, it’s so incoherent, atonal and contrived that it feels as if a good film has been left behind. The treatment of intelligence is (ironically) dumbed down and safely neutered to ensure that audiences don’t feel too bad about a genius running around not solving world hunger. It’s too bad—the first half does have promise, the small-town atmosphere is nicely rendered (until it isn’t) and there’s some decent supporting work from Kyra Sedgwick, Forest Whitaker and Robert Duvall. But the result feels like a big bowl of everything with far too much mawkishness thrown in. How did this go wrong?

  • The Mauritanian (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix Streaming, July 2022) One fascinating aspect of hitting one’s middle age is a far more personal relationship to history. Having lived through the entire psychotic War on Terror episode of the American government, it’s not as if the infuriating nature of the Guantanamo Bay Detention Centre (still active as of this writing!) was unknown. In fact, I wasn’t looking forward to The Mauritanian: what could a film about a Gitmo prisoner have to say? Are we going to speedrun through the torture, the futility of most detentions, and the extrajudicial loopholes allowed by the base’s special status? Well, yes: The Mauritanian is based on the real story of Mohamedou Ould Slahi, who was held for fourteen years in Guantanamo Bay and eventually released (after much pressure) to no formal charges. But this depressing story is given fresh interest through a surprisingly compelling execution that brings together an interesting mix of known actors (Tahar Rahim, Jodie Foster, Shailene Woodley, Benedict Cumberbatch) and a script that keeps things interesting even when familiar. Rahim is particularly good in a charming trilingual performance: the film would not have worked without a likable actor in the title role, and he makes the most out of his moments. Foster is now firmly typed in power-matriarchal roles, while Woodley seems to be reinventing herself successfully as a character actress—alas, Cumberbatch seems oddly cast in that even his southern-USA accent can’t quite justify why they would cast him in a rather flat role. Still, the film itself holds one’s attention as it goes back and forth between the prisoner and the people working for his release: At a time when the rule of law seems more precarious than ever in the United States, it’s not a bad thing to have a recent example of insurmountable odds from which to draw inspiration. It’s not that good of a film, but at least The Mauritanian overcomes a lot of built-in prejudice against it. It doesn’t feel as much like a rehash of familiar recent history, but approaches solid character-driven drama at times. Alas, one notes that the real-life odyssey of The Mauritanian’s real-world inspiration isn’t over yet—exiled without a passport and separated from his family, he’s still very much still living in the shadow of his Guantanamo Bay detention.