Tag: story

Magic Mike’s Last Dance review: The sequel has lost its glee

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Giving a voice to women in the new film has been a talking point for Tatum. And it’s a neat reversal from the usual gender roles that Maxandra has the money and the power. Too bad they didn’t give Hayek Pinault a character along with a string of feminist pronouncements. Maxandra says more than once – in case we missed the point? – that Mike’s lap dance reminded her who she really is. And she wonders why Isabel in the play has to choose between a loveless marriage for money and being a social outcast. Why can’t a woman be free? Those are good ideas to live by but horrible as movie dialogue. And while the story teases a connection between Maxandra and Mike, there is no chemistry between the actors after the first dance.

Tatum is as charismatic as ever, and the script gives him a few flashes of wit. Rehearsing the dancers, he tells them to prepare for “a zombie apocalypse of repressed desire” from the audience. But the goofiness that was part of Mike’s appeal is gone.

Magic Mike XXL coasted on the charm of the original, with a different director. But along with Reid Carolin, who wrote all three instalments, Soderbergh returns to direct Last Dance. His usual crisp style and pace only occasionally emerge here. There are uncharacteristically flabby touches, including a montage of dancers auditioning intercut with shots of Maxandra and Mike scouting street performers and looking like they’re in some clichéd London travel show. When Mike leads his rehearsals, Soderbergh’s camera swirls around a lap dance in a visceral, cinematic way. When we see the final live show, though, we have no sense of why it might be dynamic on a stage.

The theme of wealth and power is dropped for long stretches only to surface at the end with the trite idea that money doesn’t matter. Really? After all that? This tepid film proves that Tatum still has great moves, but that even Mike, magical though he was, can’t dance forever.

★★★☆☆

Magic Mike’s Last Dance is released worldwide from 10 February.

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February 7, 2023
Clues hidden in The Last of Us credits

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It makes sense that creativity in title sequences was shifting from film to television as TV itself became increasingly cinematic. The Sopranos ushered in the era of prestige TV – and its opening credits set the scene for something special.

“When you think about that title sequence, with Tony driving from New York into New Jersey, establishing his domain, showing exactly where his kingdom lies and the way the camera frames and establishes him as a leader, the kingpin, and as this mysterious figure… it just lent so much gravitas, and gave you so much insight into the situation of the show,” says Lola Landekic, editor in chief of Art of the Title, a publication dedicated to title sequence design in TV and film. “It became such an important bridge into the world of the show.”

The theme song – Alabama 3’s Woke Up This Morning (which the band apparently licensed to the show for just $500) – is now inextricably linked with Tony Soprano, too. “I think whenever anyone hears that song now, it’s so impossible to think of it on its own. It has taken on this entire character of the show now,” says Landekic. “Something like that can really extend the life of a show and embed it so deeply into viewers’ minds that it just creates this deeper appreciation and deeper connection.”

Landekic, a graphic designer, has been editor since 2011 of the Art of the Title site, where the mission is “to make people aware of the blood, sweat and tears that goes into these beautiful pieces of art that they experience”.

But when there’s now the option to skip the intro completely, why are shows still putting so much effort into them? Landekic says the rise of streaming services and sheer amount of TV we have to choose from demands it. “There’s a sort of titles arms race to compete for viewers. This branding of the show becomes much more intense, much more important to draw in viewers and maintain that foothold in someone’s memory in a field that is so saturated now with product. Ultimately, when you’re creating any kind of cultural product, what you’re looking for is connection. The branding of that show, or that product, is what gets you there. I think not paying attention to that is a huge mistake.”

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February 6, 2023
EO: Cinema’s ultimate scene-stealers

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Midway through the film, the donkey, having made his escape from a sanctuary and trekked through field and forest, wanders into a small Polish town. “The donkey was supposed to look at fish in a [shop window] but it looked, and it saw itself, its own reflection, and started to make a noise,” EO’s chief wrangler Agata Kordos tells BBC Culture. “That was a spontaneous reaction and was actually used in the film. Unlike a dog, which you can train to make noise on command, a donkey doesn’t do that. Sometimes you think that you’ve trained the donkey to make a noise on command, but it doesn’t work that way – he does whatever he likes.”

Moments like this, Pick suggests, are appearing more frequently in arthouse films and are what mainstream cinema should aim for: “Animals are narrative disruptors. Unless they’re trained, unless their movements are predictable, they introduce all these things that makes cinema feel wonderful – spontaneity, unpredictability, movement, dynamism and liveliness. If the director is committed to allowing that to happen, I think that makes for a great animal film.”

Animals taking centre stage

Animals have been on camera since cinema’s inception, with the first filmic technology producing Eadweard Muybridge’s Horse in Motion (1878). The earliest film to star an animal actor, Rescued by Rover (1905), saw a brave dog reunite a kidnapped baby with its parents, featuring collie Blair – soon to become a household name – as the hero. “These narratives of love, loyalty and affection from animals have travelled all the way through cinema,” Dr Claire Parkinson, author of Popular Media and Animals, tells BBC Culture. “There’s this romanticised reassurance of the human-animal bond.” In his 1993 book, Picturing the Beast, Steve Baker argued that animals have stood in as symbols for a nation in war films. Think War Horse (2011), which follows a four-legged hero on the frontline, or Dog (2022), starring Channing Tatum, a sentimental story about an army hound.

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February 5, 2023
The unruly ancient rituals still practised today

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A revival of interest in chaotic folk customs can tell us a lot about life now

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February 3, 2023
How country-pop superstar Shania Twain became a Gen Z icon

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Twain’s revival is all the more remarkable because Queen of Me is only her second studio album since 2002. Giddy Up!, its thumpingly infectious second single, features a cute nod to the decade in which Twain began her imperial phase: “I got a fast car with the ’90s on,” she sings. And what an imperial phase it was: in the US, Twain remains the only female artist in history to have three consecutive albums certified diamond for sales of 10 million apiece. Twain’s white-hot streak began with 1995’s The Woman in Me, then continued with 1997’s Come On Over and 2002’s Up!. The latter was so designed with global domination in mind that Twain released it in three different versions: “red” with pop-focused production, “green” with a country twang, and “blue” with an international flavour. It was a move that oozed confidence.

However, the jewel in Twain’s crown is undoubtedly Come On Over, an era-defining blockbuster that is still the best-selling LP of all time by a solo female artist. On its way to shifting an estimated 40 million copies worldwide, it yielded two country ballads that remain radio and karaoke staples to this day: From This Moment On and You’re Still the One. It also spawned two unstoppable pop-crossover hits with indelible music videos. If someone asked you to picture Shania Twain, you would probably imagine her hitchhiking across the desert in a hooded leopard-skin suit – her signature look from the That Don’t Impress Me Much video, which is now on display in the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville. If not, you might visualise her in the empowering Man! I Feel Like a Woman! promo: here she rocks fishnet stockings, a black corset and a top hat as she marshals an all-male backing band in a gender-reversed homage to Robert Palmer’s Addicted to Love.

Both Man! I Feel Like a Woman! and That Don’t Impress Me Much showcase what Muna characterise as a “highlight” of Twain’s songwriting style – namely, “the importance of being funny and playful”. “OK, so you’re Brad Pitt,” she deadpans on the latter before delivering the iconic payoff: “That don’t impress me much!” During her imperial phase in particular, Twain was never afraid to punctuate her song titles with idiosyncratic exclamation marks and parentheses. I’m Not in the Mood (To Say No)! from Up! is quintessential Twain: you can tell it’s her from the title alone.

Her particular songwriting gifts

This utterly unselfconscious exuberant streak is one of Twain’s many gifts as a songwriter. Another is her ability to express universally relatable sentiments in a way that feels fresh and definitive. When she sings “You’re still the one I kiss goodnight” on You’re Still the One, she is essentially crystallising an entire relationship into just eight words. She also has a nifty turn-of-phrase, as exemplified by the way she gently scolds a jealous lover on Don’t Be Stupid (You Know I Love You): “You even get suspicious when I paint my nails, it’s definitely distracting the way you dramatise every little small detail.” In this sense, Twain is arguably the Fleetwood Mac of the 1990s and early 2000s, though her own songwriting style is generally lighter.

At times, however, she has released darker and more cathartic music, most notably on her 2017 comeback album Now. Penned by Twain without co-writers, it features several downbeat songs about the breakdown of her marriage to music producer Robert John “Mutt” Lange, who worked with her on The Woman in Me, Come On Over and Up!. “Poor me this, poor me that, why do I keep looking back?” Twain sings on Poor Me. “Still can’t believe he’d leave me to love her.” The “her” she is most likely referring to is Twain’s former best friend and secretary, Marie-Anne Thiébaud, with whom Lange had an affair.

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February 2, 2023
Have we reached mass-media overload?

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The effects of mass media and communication is an area that has been extensively studied by human behavioral experts. Dr Sharon Coen is a media psychologist and senior lecturer at Manchester’s University of Salford. “I think art, paradoxically, has a better chance than I do in getting the message across,” she tells BBC Culture. “If I say it, it will sound like doom. First of all, artists can take a non-traditional, non-scientific approach, which can help us to understand things in different ways. An art piece hits in the heart.”

While Coen recognises the negative effects that mass media can have, she feels positive about the human ability to recognise the dangers. “There are a lot of alarmist attitudes, feelings of ‘Oh my God, we’re screwed’,” she says. “Actually, the more I talk to people and observe my surroundings, I realise that we are very strategic. With ‘doom scrolling’, some people get sucked in and they spend hours and hours looking at terrible stuff online. But guess what, how did we learn about doom scrolling? Because people realised they were doing it and said ‘Oh, this isn’t good.’ So while it is a problem, I don’t think we should underestimate ourselves.”

Coen traces the fear of collective cognitive decline to long before the internet was formed, and even before the visual overload of television. “A lot of my peers have a tendency to blame the internet and say it’s the origin of all our problems,” she says. “I keep telling them, more than 2,000 years ago Socrates hated writing. Why? Because he was saying we were going to become stupid and not be able to remember anything. He thought our cognitive functioning would change. But in writing we save mental space that we would use in trying to remember everything, and we can use that for other things. It’s always a balance.”

Many of today’s artists have one eye on the trailblazing names who came before them, and the other on future developments that loom on the horizon. “I loathe the idea of the metaverse,” says Holder, “but it seems as if this is the way that the mega-cyber corps want to take us, creating a virtual layer of reality, a simulation of life. Grandiose claims are being made about it. That it will help improve mental health, reduce crime rates and save the planet, but I’m sceptical, and think that the opposite will also be true. I think we should give up on the idea of trying to create a copy of the world in digital form, life is far too complex, it can’t be simulated.”

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February 1, 2023
M Night Shyamalan’s Knock at the Cabin is ‘passably tense’

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Adapted from The Cabin at the End of the World, a novel by Paul Tremblay, Knock at the Cabin sees Shyamalan returning to the apocalyptic concerns of two of his earlier films, Signs and The Happening. They’re timely concerns, considering how anxious so many of us are about pandemics, wars and the climate crisis. And the question of what you might sacrifice for the sake of the planet is a fascinating one. But Knock at the Cabin ends up being no more than a passably tense, low-budget chamber piece that doesn’t do justice to its Old Testament conceit.

The problem is that almost everything worth knowing about the film is in the trailer – and indeed in the plot summary in this review. Shyamalan establishes within half an hour that there are only two likely ways for the story to go: either the strangers are lying, and the business about the apocalypse is nonsense, or else they’re not lying, and a sacrifice really is necessary to save humanity. What that means is that the viewer spends most of the running time sitting and waiting to learn which answer is the right one (and anyone who’s seen the trailer will have a pretty shrewd idea). The Shyamalan who made The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable and The Village 20-odd years ago might have blindsided us with a further twist which flipped our understanding of the whole situation. But in this film, as in his last one, Old, he puts all of his energy into setting up an intriguing premise, and none into moving on from that premise and into unexpected places.

He and his co-writers, Steve Desmond and Michael Sherman, allude to a couple of interesting issues, such as the homophobia of the religious right, and the 21st-Century phenomenon of people making online contact with others who share their outlandish beliefs. But the screenplay doesn’t give any of these issues more than a passing mention, nor does it comment seriously on the existential threats that face us in the real world. It feels as if the filmmakers are workshopping various different themes, without ever committing to any of them.

They don’t commit to terrifying us, either. Bautista proves, once again, to be a sensitive dramatic actor, rather than a wall of muscle, but Leonard and his crew are too relaxed to convince us of the urgency of their mind-boggling ultimatum. They don’t seem crazed enough to be telling the truth about the apocalypse – and they don’t seem crazed enough to be faking it. In fact, almost nothing in the film seems real. Stuck with one-dimensional characters and functional dialogue, the hostage-takers and their hostages sound more like school debate teams than desperate people trying to save their lives and / or the human race.

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February 1, 2023
History’s most incredible drag queens and kings

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This bigotry has helped suppress from the mainstream historical record a whole queer subculture. And there are some compelling real-life stories that have been all but forgotten – that would surely make for brilliant novels, films, plays or otherwise.

For example, there’s John Cooper, the 18th-Century Englishman who dressed up as his drag alter ego Princess Seraphina and frequented London taverns known as “molly houses”, flaunting himself through the streets with a remarkable degree of openness for a time when gay sex was punishable by execution. Cooper is widely accepted to be the first drag queen in English history – sorry, herstory – or at least the first man for whom dressing up as a female alter ego was a key part of his identity.

Then in 1880, a drag ball took place at the Temperance Hall in Hulme, a district of Manchester. This was attended by 47 men, half of whom were dressed in women’s clothing, all of whom gained access by whispering the code word “Sister”. But the venue was raided by the police and all the men were arrested, prosecuted, and named and shamed in the press. Many of them were ruined. Imagine telling this story to modern-day audiences – imagine the empathy it could ignite, the emotional impact it could make.

Despite fierce persecution, drag culture blossomed around the world. In Berlin between the late 19th-Century and the 1930s, countless cross-dressing balls – known as Urningsballs or Tuntenballs – took place at various venues. The star queen of the scene was Hansi Sturm, whose act as Miss Eldorado culminated in him throwing his fake breasts into the audience.

In the US, the first person known to describe himself as a “queen of drag” was William Dorsey Swann, a former slave born in Maryland. In the 1880s, Swann hosted several drag balls in Washington, DC, at which he’d be accompanied by his partner, Pierce Lafayette. But after a police raid in 1896, Swann was convicted and sentenced to 10 months in jail.

It was during the early days of these balls that the term “drag” started to be used, although its origins are uncertain. It may have been inspired by the dresses worn by male performers wanting to exaggerate their expression of femininity, wearing dresses that were so heavy they literally needed dragging across the floor.

One story that is widely known is that of 19th-Century English drag queens Fanny and Stella, which was turned into a 2013 bestselling non-fiction book by Neil McKenna – and subsequently, a stage musical. Ernest Boulton and Frederick Park spent years dragging up to perform and sell sex on the streets of London. But in 1870 – after a wild night at the Strand Theatre – they were arrested and charged with conspiracy to commit sodomy. The trial whipped up public outrage, although Boulton and Park were eventually found not guilty because of a lack of evidence that sodomy had occurred.

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January 31, 2023
Femme fatale: The images that reveal male fears

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In John William Waterhouse’s Circe (1892), there is no question that her power is linked to her seductive nature, while John Collier’s highly eroticised depiction of Lilith (1889), which sees her revelling in the snake that coils around her naked body, couldn’t be further from Rossetti’s portrayal.

Artists as diverse as Gustav Moreau, Gustav Klimt and Edvard Munch all portrayed the femme fatale, and there was rarely any room for ambiguity – these women were dangerous temptresses.

Although most artists relied on biblical or mythical imagery, The Impressionists, as one would expect given their focus on everyday life, transported the femme fatale to the present day.

Modern-day femmes fatales

Édouard Manet’s Nana (1877), which depicts a high-class prostitute in a state of undress with her next client seated on a sofa behind her, is widely thought to have been inspired by Zola’s character of the same name. Nana, who made her first appearance in L’Assommoir before becoming the subject of her own eponymous novel in 1880, destroys every man who desires her before dying her own horrible death of smallpox. The painting was refused entry to the Paris Salon, perhaps because the contemporary setting was a little too close to the bone.

Max Lieberman took an equally contemporary approach in his Samson and Delilah (1902), turning the biblical story into a modern-day battle of the sexes. Delilah, triumphantly holding her lover’s shorn hair above her head with one hand, while crushing him into the bed with the other, is the embodiment of the powerful, sexually confident woman that so unnerved the men of the era.

The femme fatale was also a favourite subject for sculptors. Some particularly striking examples can be seen in The Colour of Anxiety: Race, Sexuality and Disorder at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, which explores the intriguing premise that the increasing use of colour in 19th-Century sculpture was a means of highlighting Victorian anxieties.

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January 31, 2023
11 of the best TV shows to watch this February

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From Netflix hit You to a new travel show with Schitt’s Creek’s Eugene Levy

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January 29, 2023
How to make your home minimalist – but also comfortable

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Danish interior design studio Space Copenhagen also links indoors and out when dreaming up minimalist interiors. “We prefer sheer fabrics for curtains and blinds that allow for outside daylight to filter softly into spaces,” says Signe Bindslev Henriksen, co-founder of the company, who sums up its style as “poetic modernism”. She tells BBC Culture: “Translucency avoids creating a hard boundary between inside and outside. Overall, we choose natural, tactile, organic materials – wood, stone, leather, linen, warm-toned metals and exposed plaster – and subdued, earthy colour tones.”

For David Montalba, founder of Montalba Architects, which has offices in Los Angeles and Lausanne, Switzerland, integrating views of the surrounding landscape into a minimalist home is essential to making it feel warm. “The landscape can be a house’s rural setting or a courtyard with paving and planting, as found within a triple-height atrium at our project Vertical Courtyard House in LA,” says Montalba, who grew up in Switzerland and the Carmel area of California. He is influenced by the Southern Californian regionalist architecture of Irving Gill, whose early 20th-Century houses featured simple interiors, plain fireplaces and skylights, and George Brook-Kothlow, who incorporated an abundance of wood into his houses. “Engaging with the outdoors helps soften a minimalist home, as do bookshelves, art and textiles. In one living space at Vertical Courtyard House, a wall-hung textile piece by Canadian artist Brent Wadden adds warmth and texture.”

Comfort zone

And interior designer Rukmini Patel has created a warmly minimalist living room for a home in Stratford-upon-Avon, using colours and materials inspired by nature. “My client, who has a house with a garden, expressed a wish for the interior to connect with the outdoors,” she says. “When creating a cosy minimalist home, I feel it’s important to use a multitude of natural materials, textures and colours that engage the senses. For the living room I chose autumnal tones – rust, burnt orange and olive green – and wicker and wood to evoke nature. I opted for wood flooring, echoing this with wood, rather than colder metal or glass furniture, and a warm peachy cream shade for the walls. I also plumped for a thick, tactile Berber rug that is calming and relaxing when you sink your feet into it.”

Smith believes a warmly minimalist interior can be achieved simply by combining a limited number of contrasting textures: “Play with the juxtaposition of opposites as transitioning from one to the other heightens the senses. Imagine walking barefoot on a hard smooth floor, then stepping on to a soft textured rug, and the feeling of warmth and luxury that brings.”

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January 27, 2023
11 of the best films to watch this February

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(Image credit: Warner Bros)

Including the third Ant-Man and Magic Mike films, Cocaine Bear and a Pamela Anderson documentary in which she tells her own story – Nicholas Barber lists this month’s unmissable releases.

1. Saint Omer

Why would anyone kill their own baby? Alice Diop asked herself that question in 2016, when she was watching the trial of a French-Senegalese woman who had left her child on a beach to drown. Having made a name for herself as a documentary filmmaker, Diop has turned her memories of the trial into a gripping drama, Saint Omer. Kayije Kagame plays Rama, a pregnant, Diop-like novelist who plans to use the case in her book on the Greek myth of the child-killing Medea. Guslagie Malanda plays Laurence Coly, the complex woman on trial. “Diop consciously uses the many tropes of true crime documentaries,” says Sheila O’Malley at RogerEbert.com, “while at the same time up-ending them. In doing so, Saint Omer becomes a much larger reflection on contemporary French life, the experience of immigrants, and the shadows we drag along with us as we move into a different space.”

Released on 3 February in the UK and Ireland and 9 February in the Netherlands

Women Talking is another high-profile new film exploring male sexual violence from the perspective of victims (Credit: Alamy)

2. Women Talking

Women Talking has just been nominated for best picture and best adapted screenplay at this year’s Oscars. Written and directed by Sarah Polley, and drawing from Miriam Toew’s 2018 fact-based novel, the film features Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley, Rooney Mara and a cameo-ing Frances McDormand as the residents of a remote religious community where the men have been drugging and raping the women for years. When the crimes finally come to light, the women have to decide what to do: forgive their attackers, fight for justice, or leave the community, even if that means, according to what they’ve been taught, that they will lose their chance of going to heaven. Lindsey Bahr at Associated Press says that Polley’s “extraordinary” film “is expressionistic and lyrical, biting and poetic. The conversations are messy, the feminism contradictory and the trauma complicated… It is astute and urgent and may just help those previously unable to find words or even coherent feelings for their own traumatic experiences.”

Released on 9 February in Germany, 10 February in the UK and Ireland, 16 February in Australia and the Netherlands and 17 February in Spain and Sweden

(Credit: ZIP CINEMA & CJ ENM Co)

3. Broker

Hirokazu Kore-Eda has written and directed a huge number of beautifully humane films, including 2018’s award-winning Shoplifters, but Broker could be his most delightful. Set in South Korea, its unlikely hero (Song Kang-ho, the star of Parasite) is a launderette owner with a shocking sideline: he takes infants from a church’s “baby box”, a hatch where people can leave unwanted children, and then sells those infants to would-be adoptive parents. However, police detectives are watching him, and so is the young mother of the latest child he is selling. As dark as this premise may sound, Broker becomes a funny, big-hearted road movie about a group of loners becoming a family. “There’s an astonishing sympathy for the unforgivable decisions we make, a patience for all the strange journeys you have to take in order to shake off the resentment passed down by generations,” says Ella Kemp at IndieWire. “And, somehow, the filmmaker always finds a way to see light in it all.”

Released on 3 February in the UK

4. Pamela, A Love Story

Last year’s Disney+ drama series, Pam & Tommy, recounted how Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s honeymoon sex tape was stolen, copied, and distributed around the world. The series seemed to support Anderson, but it was made without her cooperation, and so on one level the producers were perpetuating the very exploitation they claimed to be condemning. As Laura Martin put it in her BBC Culture review: “It feels like grubby stuff that, sadly, has facilitated the real-life victim being unwantedly pushed back into the headlines for an episode she’d likely rather forget.” Now, an intimate documentary from Ryan White, the director of Serena and Good Night Oppy, allows Anderson to present her life the way she wants to – as well as allowing Netflix to take the moral high ground from Disney+. “I blocked that stolen tape out of my life in order to survive, and now that it’s all coming back again, I feel sick,” says Anderson in the trailer for Pamela, A Love Story. “I want to take control of the narrative for the first time.”

Released on Netflix on 31 January

5. Blue Jean

In 1988, Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government introduced Clause 28 in the UK, a law banning local authorities from “promoting homosexuality” and schools from “teaching homosexuality as a pretended family relationship”. It’s a nerve-racking time for Jean (Rosy McEwan), the heroine of Georgia Oakley’s Bafta-nominated drama. A PE teacher in a happy same-sex relationship, Jean prefers to keep her sexuality secret at school. But when a new pupil, Lois (Lucy Halliday), spots her in a lesbian bar, she fears that the secret will come out. “This superb debut from writer and director Georgia Oakley uses an intimate character study as a lens through which to view a period of profound crisis and upheaval for the gay community,” writes Wendy Ide in Screen Daily. “It’s a remarkably accomplished picture on every level, not least the keenly felt and fiercely authentic performances.”

Released on 10 February in the UK and Ireland

6. Magic Mike’s Last Dance

Channing Tatum shows off his abs again for the third and final film in his male stripper series, directed, as the first film was, by Steven Soderbergh. Tatum’s character, Mike Lane, has been working as a bartender in Miami since the events of Magic Mike XXL (2015), but after he demonstrates his lap-dancing prowess to a wealthy socialite (Salma Hayek Pinault), she talks him into putting on a burlesque revue in London. Magic Mike’s Last Dance is inspired by a real stage show, Magic Mike Live London, which was created by Tatum in 2018. But it was also prompted by his desire to give Mike a powerful female counterpart. “Really, the first two movies are about men made for women, or people that like men, but none of them had really strong female characters,” he told Jessica Pressler in Vanity Fair, “so it felt like we hoodwinked people on some level. Like we cheated the code.”

Released from 9 February internationally

7. Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania

The first two Ant-Man films were small-scale in more ways than one. They were carried by the charm of their leading man, Paul Rudd, but they were trifling and forgettable: can anyone remember who the villain was in 2018’s Ant-Man and the Wasp? The series’ director, Peyton Reed, promises that the third Ant-Man film will be different. Instead of a light-hearted comedy caper confined to San Francisco, he has made an epic adventure set in a microscopic universe ruled by the time-travelling Kang the Conqueror (Jonathan Majors). “People felt like, ‘Oh, these are fun little palate cleansers after a gigantic Avengers movie’,” Reed told Clark Collis of EW. “For this third one, I said, ‘I don’t want to be the palate cleanser anymore. I want to be the big Avengers movie’ … It struck me as interesting to take the tiniest Avengers – in some people’s minds maybe the least powerful Avengers — and put them up against the most powerful force in the multiverse.”

Released from 15 February internationally

8. Knock at the Cabin

If US cinema has taught us anything, it’s that going on holiday to a cabin in the woods is always a terrible idea. The latest person to teach us this lesson is M Night Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense, Signs), who has adapted his apocalyptic chiller from Paul Tremblay’s nightmarish horror novel, The Cabin at the End of the World. In this instance, the people foolish enough to stay in a secluded cabin are a girl (Kristen Cui) and her parents (Jonathan Groff and Ben Aldridge). Four strangers (Dave Bautista, Rupert Grint, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Abby Quinn) come to their door and announce that one member of the family has to be sacrificed, or else the human race will be wiped out. The weird part is that the strangers could well be telling the truth. “It’s a wonderful discussion that we’re all going to have when you watch the movie,” Shyamalan said to Jamie Graham in Total Film. “Is humanity worth saving? Are we good? The human experiment – is this working?”

Released from 1 February internationally

Cocaine Bear (Credit: Universal Pictures)

9. Cocaine Bear

Very, very loosely based on a true story, Cocaine Bear is a horror comedy set in 1985, when a drug dealer throws a duffel bag of cocaine out of his plane. The plan is that one of his employees will collect the bag, but a black bear swallows its contents first, and rampages through a Georgia forest in a drug-crazed frenzy. Potentially the most fun film about ursine-related chaos since Paddington 2, Cocaine Bear stars Keri Russell, O’Shea Jackson, Alden Ehrenreich and the late Ray Liotta as the unlucky hikers and gangsters who are in the forest at the time. It’s directed by Elizabeth Banks (Pitch Perfect 2, Charlie’s Angels), who told Peter Gray at the AU Review: “I love characters who are funny and underdogs. I think when you’re up against a bear high on cocaine it doesn’t matter who you are. You’re an underdog in that scenario. That’s what really excited me about these characters. It felt almost like a Coen Brothers movie wrapped into a Sam Raimi movie wrapped into Jaws!”

Released from 22 February internationally

10. The Amazing Maurice

Puss in Boots: The Last Wish isn’t this winter’s only fantasy cartoon about a talking cat. The other is The Amazing Maurice, adapted from Terry Pratchett’s award-winning children’s novel, and featuring Hugh Laurie as the voice of the titular feline. Maurice is the brains behind a Pied Piper-related con. Whenever he finds a promising-looking village, he instructs his faithful gang of rats (including one voiced by David Tennant) to run riot, whereupon his mild-mannered human pal, Keith (Himesh Patel), offers to deal with the rodent infestation. The trouble begins when they come to a town that already has its own genuine rat problem, and its own genuine ratcatchers – or so it seems. The Amazing Maurice “is a riot of silliness from start to finish, featuring top dollar actors hamming it up nicely,” says Cath Clarke at The Guardian. “This is a film with a lot of charm, and gives cinema its most lovable rats since Ratatouille.”

Released on 1 February in France, 2 February in Mexico, 3 February in the US and India, and 9 February in Germany

11. Your Place or Mine

Released just in time for Valentine’s Day, Your Place or Mine stars Reese Witherspoon and Ashton Kutcher as two long-term platonic best friends. She lives in New York and he lives in Los Angeles, but when they swap houses for a week, so that she can have a holiday while he babysits her son, they come to realise… well, you can probably guess what they come to realise. Your Place or Mine promises to be an archetypal Hollywood romantic comedy, from its premise to its cast to its writer-director, Aline Brosh McKenna (27 Dresses). But that’s not a criticism. The film industry has shied away from this sort of sugary treat for the last decade, so it’s about time it fell in love with the romcom once again.

Released on 10 February on Netflix

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January 26, 2023
Colette: The most beloved French writer of all time

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However, with Willy still retaining the royalties from the Claudine books, Colette was penniless, and to earn money she became a music hall performer. This appealed to her sense of performance and enabled her to play with gender roles: one minute dressed in drag as a besuited man, the next posing with a bare breast in the bodice-ripping pantomime The Flesh. Her experience in music hall inspired her 1910 novel The Vagabond, the highly autobiographical story of performer Renée Néré and a lover she calls “the Big Noodle”, which asks modern questions about the separation of love and sex, and how society seeks to control both through the institution of marriage. (An institution about which, of course, Colette and therefore Renée had great scepticism.) It was The Vagabond that catapulted Colette to literary acclaim for the first time, and the book won three votes for the prestigious Prix Goncourt.

Writing ‘immoral’ books

Colette’s time in music hall might have galvanised her interest in putting herself centre-stage in her fiction. One of her finest examples of this is the late novel Chance Acquaintances (1940), in which Colette the narrator visits a health resort where wealthy women (with fashionably bobbed hair) undergo dubious cures: “nasal douches, steam rooms, flushing the kidneys”. There she meets a husband and wife, the Haumes. Mme Haume is unwell, while M Haume has the appearance of “someone with very few thoughts in his head”. Colette discovers, however, that M Haume is having an affair and that his lover, back in Paris, has gone silent on him. Naturally, this is Colette’s ideal territory, and she agrees to visit his lover in Paris to find out the true story. The plot shows Colette’s appetite for mischief, as well as her enduring interest in the vagaries of the human heart, while M Haume finds that “when intrigue is called into play, a woman never forgets that feminine instinct is the older in guile.”

After Willy, Colette’s second husband, Henry de Jouvenel, could only be an improvement, and as editor of leading newspaper Le Matin, he was also able to publish his wife’s work. But even this came unstuck, as he was forced to abandon the serialised publication of a new book, Ripening Seed (1923), due to the shock it caused readers, and he asked her why she could not write novels that were not immoral.

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January 25, 2023
Poker Face review: A deft Columbo update for Knives Out fans

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The sleek, involving first episode, written and directed by Johnson, is among the best. The murder happens at a garish Las Vegas-like hotel and casino, and the episode is shot to look like a 1970s television show, with saturated colours and ominous music cues. That playful look works once, then Johnson smartly drops it for more cinematic approaches in later instalments. He knows how far to mimic a formula and when to throw it away. (Other writers and directors take over, starting with episode three.)

When a hotel maid (Dasha Polanco) discovers a horrifying image on a guest’s computer in that first story, she notifies the hotel manager, played with perfect smarminess by Adrien Brody. Establishing the show’s pattern, Charlie turns up about 20 minutes in and the timeline shifts back to before the murder, with scenes telling us why she was around in the first place. Here she turns up as a cocktail waitress wearing a goofy feathered hat.

It’s enough to say that things go wrong and Charlie has to flee, with the casino’s hitman, (Benjamin Bratt) chasing after her. Bratt’s character gives the series its slender continuity and a reason for Charlie to travel around under the radar, taking jobs as a waitress or a cleaner, trying to stay a step ahead of the killer.

The guests are not mega movie stars, but familiar faces. In one episode, Chloe Sevigny, who played Lyonne’s character’s mother in Russian Doll’s flashbacks, stars as Ruby Ruin, a has-been singer in a metal band, now working at a warehouse. She gets the band back together and goes on the road, with Charlie selling their T-shirts. Like the Knives Out mysteries, Poker Face walks the line between straightforward and tongue-in-cheek, but where the films land on the campier side, the series is more invested in its plots. No detail is too small or silly to be a clue or a red herring, including the title of the metal band’s one hit, Staplehead.

Lil Rel Howery plays the co-owner of a Texas barbecue restaurant, whose brother wants to quit the business, saying, “I’m going vegan”. Wit always takes precedence over seriousness here. Someone falls off a roof at a rest stop in New Mexico, where Charlie meets a trucker played by Hong Chau (The Whale). She later works at a retirement home and befriends 1970s radicals gleefully played by Judith Light and S Epatha Merkerson.

One other nostalgic touch: like those old series, Poker Face is not necessarily made to binge. It’s there, ready whenever you feel like a reassuring, cosy mystery that’s more rumpled crime-solver than Miss Marple.

★★★★☆

Poker Face premieres on 26 January on Peacock in the US

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January 25, 2023
The comedian fighting prejudice with laughter in Georgia

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During the day, Kikonishvili works with artist and activist Tekla Tevdorashvili and others at the Fungus Gallery, an LGBTQ+ art collective and gallery in a quiet corner of Tblisi that invites artists from across the Caucasus region. Tevdorashvili says it is hard to understate the importance of club culture in these social changes. “Nightlife changed the whole context of how Georgian society perceives queer people. Clubs were the first place to offer them a safe space, and now the attitude people have in the clubs is shifting to daylight.”

Another hotspot for Tblisi nightlife is Success bar, the only gay bar in the entire Caucasus. Its owner Nia Gvatua initially just wanted to redecorate the somewhat dingy place so that she could make it worth visiting for the local community. Five years ago, after asking around, she was invited to meet with a local businessman, who proceeded to open his safe and gave her $20,000 cash on the spot. She set about transforming the bar into a cultural hub. “When I began, it was more about aesthetics. I was really into electronic music for many years, so when I began, I was more focused on which DJs I wanted to book and what cocktails I wanted to make.” A linchpin of the Tblisi LGBTQ+ scene who has shared style tips with Vogue, Gvatua documents the scene with photography, and directs drag shows at Success, Bassiani and other venues.

Resistance and resilience

But Tevdorashvili and others wanted to get involved in more than just clubs, so they set up Fungus, where they recently put on Resilience, a group exhibition of photography and multimedia art dedicated to trans women. Named as such because fungus comes from the dark underground, Fungus’s motto is “we thrive wherever we get even a little chance to grow,” and it’s located next to Clara’s bar, where Talikishvili performs fortnightly. Though the reception from the locals was initially awkward, things have warmed up a lot recently, with one man coming recently to tell them “respect from the neighbourhood!”.

For Tevdorashvili, this need for safe spaces is all too real. A few years ago she put an art installation up in a public park days before the annual church-organised “day for family purity”. The installation was a rainbow-coloured box entitled “Closet”, with handwritten notes from the LGBTQ+ community, which played a speech and then the Diana Ross song Coming Out. She had only told a few trusted blogs about it in advance, but it was attacked by a far-right activist within just a few hours of being up. Tevdorashvili recognised him from demonstrations. The police came but they advised against putting the artwork back up. This was a setback, she says, but not a defeat: “What we artists and activists has gone through have only made us stronger.“

Kikonishvili agrees. “It’s not like homosexuality was invented in Georgia after the breakup of the Soviet Union,” he laughs. Though it was briefly made legal after the October revolution, Joseph Stalin (born in Georgia as Iosip Jugashvili) criminalised homosexuality again in 1934, with the strong support of author Maxim Gorky. (The freedom of same-sex sexual activity was not officially enshrined in law in Georgia until 2000, and, of course, despite that legality, social acceptance has been another matter.)

Kikonishvili points to the Berikaoba festival, which he says is celebrated across the country by cross-dressing, drinking and feasting, as well as the popularity of gay Georgian cultural figures like the famed Tblisi-born director Sergei Parajanov and traditional dancer Vakhtang Chabukiani, as evidence of the shallow roots of contemporary homophobia in Georgia. “Chabukiani is the most beloved Georgian dancer ever, and he was gay and everyone knew it.” Parajanov, however, was persecuted by the Soviet authorities for his sexuality as much as for his subversive filmmaking.

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January 24, 2023
8 of the world’s best forest homes

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(Image credit: Sindre Ellingsen / Helen & Hard)

A new book features forest-dwelling designs across the globe, from tiny off-grid treehouses to experimental eco-friendly architecture – even in a city centre.

D

Dwellings that offer different takes on the archetypal forest refuge are featured in a new book – “flanked by towering pines, enveloped by the jungle, built into a shoreline, or perched on a mountainside”. Many of the designers in Living in the Forest (Phaidon) “have drawn from the past to build homes for the future… inspired by folklore, indigenous culture, vernacular architecture or the land itself”. In doing so, they have broken new ground in green construction, “reframing the way we live in nature”.

Circle Wood, Mobius Architekci, 2020, Izabelin, Poland (Credit: Paweł Ulatowski / Przemek Olczyk)

1 Circle Wood, Mobius Architekci, 2020, Izabelin, Poland

Built in a forest clearing a short distance from Warsaw and next to the Kampinos National Park, this circular timber house features double-height spaces, balanced by more intimate rooms that are all spread around one side. Polish architects Mobius Architekci designed a terrace with a grass roof on the other side, incorporating a courtyard garden and pine trees that keep the connection between the forest and the house. Architect Przemek Olczyk originally imagined the structure as a huge tree trunk carved into an encircling woodland shelter.

Holiday Home, KRADS, 2020, Thingvellir, Iceland (Credit: Marino Thorlacius / KRADS)

2 Holiday Home, KRADS, 2020, Thingvellir, Iceland

Dense forest and a hillside plot made this project particularly challenging: Icelandic architects KRADS designed foundations that follow the slope in three staggered planes to navigate the volcanic terrain. The house’s site in the Thingvellir National Park was chosen so that it could blend into the landscape while also offering views of the lake and mountains, with a green roof that echoes the outline of the hill, and also offers panoramic framing.

Forest House, Shma, 2017, Bangkok, Thailand (Credit: Jinnawat Borihankijanan / Napon Jaturapuchapornpong / Prapan Napawongdee / Shma Company Limited)

3 Forest House, Shma, 2017, Bangkok, Thailand

A building doesn’t need to be surrounded by trees to be a forest home; Thai architects Shma designed this verdant structure in the heart of Bangkok as an experimental concept that improves air quality and counteracts rapid urbanisation. As houses encroach on green space, the Forest House gives a glimpse at one way of bringing nature to a densely populated city. Made up of a series of adjacent segments, the building has multiple roof surfaces planted with more than 120 trees to create a forest that also provides a natural screen for the street-facing bedrooms. The foliage includes more than 20 indigenous species, chosen for their minimal water requirements and shapes that would allow as much vegetation on site as possible.

Woodnest, Helen & Hard, 2020, Odda, Norway (Credit: Sindre Ellingsen / Helen & Hard)

4 Woodnest, Helen & Hard, 2020, Odda, Norway

Norwegian architects Helen & Hard designed a tree house suspended 20ft (6m) above the forest floor, on a steep hillside sloping down to the Hardangerfjord. Drawing on Norwegian architectural traditions, the firm also experimented with new ways of working with wood: reached via a bridge, the dwelling is organised around the trunk of a living tree, fastened by a metal collar with minimal damage. Woodnest’s interior is clad in untreated timber shingles, forming a protective shell that weathers over time to blend in with the forest.

Casa Bautista, Productora, 2019, Quintana Roo, Mexico (Credit: Onnis Luque / Productora)

5 Casa Bautista, Productora, 2019, Quintana Roo, Mexico

This modern home designed by Mexican architects Productora has the air of a disused industrial building slowly being reclaimed by nature. Located on a narrow strip of the Caribbean Riviera Maya, it is hidden within the jungle of a buffer zone surrounding Tulum’s Sian Ka’an Biosphere Reserve, the L-shaped plan sitting right alongside coastal trees. Trailing plants and jungle vegetation form as much of the outline as its concrete, which is pigmented to respond to the sun with shades that change over time. Minimising damage to the landscape, the building sits on a raised foundation supported by cross-shaped columns, its elevation allowing views over the jungle canopy to the sea.

Sirena House, Studio Saxe, 2020, Santa Teresa, Costa Rica (Credit: Courtesy of Benjamin G Saxe and Studio Saxe)

6 Sirena House, Studio Saxe, 2020, Santa Teresa, Costa Rica

Costa Rican architects Studio Saxe designed a series of pavilions with overlapping rooves to help this waterfront home blend into the surrounding jungle. The interiors flow out to terraces, with foliage growing between structures and glazed corridors, enveloping the building in greenery. Each room has glass doors to the outside on two or three sides, allowing the ocean breezes to circulate, and the green design minimises energy use according to weather patterns, making this project “a pioneer in sustainable tropical architecture”, according to the book.

Casa Mirador, RAMA Estudio, 2021, Pichincha, Ecuador (Credit: Jag Studio)

7 Casa Mirador, RAMA Estudio, 2021, Pichincha, Ecuador

Ecuador architects RAMA Estudio designed a metal-frame extension that hovers over the hillside, with a minimal foundation to avoid impact on the land beneath. It took less than three months to manufacture and assemble the prefabricated structure, which has a green roof for insulation. A double-sided storage unit in the middle can be accessed from both the kitchen and the living area, and a desk mounted on to one of the floor-to-ceiling windows make the most of the lush valley outside.

Niliaitta, Studio Puisto, 2020, Kivijärvi, Finland (Credit: Marc Goodwin, Archmospheres / Studio Puisto Architects)

8 Niliaitta, Studio Puisto, 2020, Kivijärvi, Finland

Flanked by pines in Finland’s Salamajärvi National Park, this black-painted cabin is set on a single steel column, offering a twist on traditional wooden huts found in Lapland. Finnish architects Studio Puisto planned minimal disruption to the land while honouring the region’s Sami heritage, reinterpreting an indigenous design that elevated huts to keep food safe from wild animals. Shielded by the woods, the cabin was positioned to avoid cutting down trees, and over time the forest floor can reclaim the area underneath.

Living in the Forest (Phaidon) is out now.

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January 23, 2023
Five ways to be calm – and why it matters

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As Daisetz T Suzuki writes in Zen in the Japanese Culture: “A haiku does not express ideas but… puts forward images reflecting intuitions. These images are not figurative representations made use of by the poetic mind, but they directly point to original intuitions, indeed they are intuitions themselves.” The suggestion is that the composition of haiku is so intuitive, it is almost unconscious.

Haiku and their close attention to the details of nature are part of the wider Japanese concepts of nagomi and ikigai, which roughly translated equate to a sense of meaning and harmony. “[Haiku] gives us an insight into why the word ikigai exists in Japanese,” writes Yukari Mitsuhashi in Ikigai: Giving Every Day Meaning and Joy. “In our everyday lives, whether we are immersing ourselves in nature or devouring traditional Japanese food, paying attention to detail grabs our focus on to what is right in front of us, instead of wondering about our to-do lists in our head… permitting us to find joy and ikigai in simple, everyday things.”

And the principles of haiku can be calming when applied to other areas of life, too. In his book Goodbye Things, Funio Sasaki writes: “Traditional paintings have few figures in them and value negative space. Japanese calligraphy and brush paintings are in black and white. Haiku is the shortest poem form in the world. These are a few examples of a minimalistic aesthetic in Japanese art and culture.” In the book, Sasaki, like Bashō all those centuries before, decides to give away most of his possessions, and explores the feeling of calm and tranquillity that results: “There are more things to gain from eliminating excess than you might imagine: time, space, freedom, and energy, for example.”

Find your flow

Calmness is regarded by some with suspicion – is a state of calmness really just a state of passivity? A surrender of engagement, giving up, or, worse, a sociopathic disconnection?

But being calm need not equate with being passive or numb. When we’re absorbed in something we love – music, gardening, drawing, knitting, writing, whatever it is – we can enter an almost trance-like state of calm, mesmerised by what we are doing. As Mitsuhashi argues in her book about ikigai, immersing ourselves in nature or a particular activity makes us focus on what is in front of us, freeing up our minds from other things, and enabling us to find peace.

In her classic work The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron encourages the reader to “make a commitment to quiet time”. She writes: “Creativity occurs in the moment, and in the moment we are timeless”.

And author Mihaly Csiksezentmihalyi argues that what really makes us feel not only calm and peaceful, but also glad to be alive, is unlocking a more fulfilling state of being. He calls this state of mind “flow”. In his book Flow: The Psychology of Happiness, he throws light on the idea that many philosophers before him have posited – that the way to peace doesn’t lie in mindless detachment, but in mindful challenge. Each of us finds our flow in different ways, and our sense of calm.

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January 22, 2023
Why cop show Homicide: Life on the Street was revolutionary

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More retrograde was the fact that the central line-up of detectives was initially going to be all-male, until Fontana and Levinson thought better of it, explains Leo. She landed the role of Howard, the only female cop in the Homicide unit. While many of the characters had direct parallels in Simon’s book, this was not the case with Howard. Female detectives were rare. There wasn’t a precedent for her, says Leo. The character was initially going to be called Kay Harvey, in a nod to Rick Garvey, one of the real-life detectives, who just like Howard had a perfect closure rate, but they decided against this as it was felt Garvey “could not possibly return to his workstation once he found out a girl was playing him,” laughs Leo.

Leo was keen to avoid portraying her in a cliched way. Howard was diligent, ambitious and highly professional, more competent than her male partner. There were also no rules about what a female detective should wear, she explains, “so we invented it”. Howard often wore a shirt and tie, she says, “something I think is becoming on a woman – which is finally being understood”.

While it was an ensemble show, Andre Braugher, who played Detective Frank Pembleton, an erudite, Jesuit-educated New Yorker with a complicated relationship with God, rapidly established himself as a standout. He had an electrifying screen presence, radiating charisma and energy. “I had never seen an actor like that on television,” says Fontana. “His rhythms were so unique to him.”

Secor’s character, Bayliss, was thrown into the deep end on his very first case, the murder of Adena Watson, an 11-year-old girl – based on the real-life murder of LaTonya Wallace, one of the most upsetting cases in Simon’s book. The detective in charge of the Wallace murder was there when they filmed many of those scenes. “It had a huge impact on his life, his relationships, and on the way that he approached his work,” says Secor, something which informed the character of Bayliss.

“Bayliss had a very high standard in terms of what was right and what was wrong,” says Secor. Bayliss’ partnership with the formidable Pembleton developed over the series. “Andre was the greatest partner in the world,” says Secor. “We saw ourselves as an old married couple.” Frequently filming in cars at 2am deepened the relationship, and the on-screen chemistry between the pair is palpable, particularly when they’re in the Box, the interrogation room in which some of the show’s most memorable scenes take place.

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January 19, 2023
Matisse’s The Dance: The masterpiece that changed history

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His shift from canvas painting to using pre-painted paper cutouts in The Dance II profoundly influenced generations of contemporary artists from Romare Bearden to Robert Motherwell and Pfaff. Ultimately, the exhibition proves Matisse lived up to his own famous words: “An artist should never be a prisoner of himself, prisoner of style, prisoner of reputation or prisoner of success.”

When Ai Weiwei was detained by Chinese authorities for nearly three months in 2011, he had no way to create art, he says. Instead, he challenged his mind to understand the people who imprisoned him and the system they worked under, he tells BBC Culture. “Imprisonment for me is a special training for a language, a new way to speak instead of what is commonly understood as a deprivation of freedom.”

Ai worked through the challenge to come out with a new strength and perception of how to be creative, going on to make some of his most engaging, culturally challenging work from 2012 onwards. “The kind of freedom I obtained there was something I could not have [developed] if I hadn’t been imprisoned in the first place,” he says.

Like Ai Weiwei, by working through creating The Dance II, Matisse broke through the quarantine of his own mind to come out the other end with a revolutionary new style of creative expression. His new focus, strictly on simple lines and bold colours, represents a complete departure from realism, speaking to his and his viewers’ emotions rather than just intellect. The invention of cut outs resulted from a profound creative process that went on to influence artists and enchant audiences into the next century.

Matisse in the 1930s is at the Philadelphia Museum of Art until 29 January, at the Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris from 27 February to 29 May and at the Musée Matisse, Nice from 23 June until 24 September.

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January 18, 2023
Le Doulos: the violent French film that changed crime cinema

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However, if Le Doulos followed in US film noir’s footsteps, there were also striking ways in which it diverged from its template – in part with its sheer intricacy. As Vincendeau puts it the “traditional clarity of action of the American cinema is challenged head-on by Le Doulos’s complex plotting, ambiguity and withholding of information, right from frame one”. Characters cannot trust each other, much to the misfortune of virtually everyone in the film. Whereas American noir would clearly reprimand its equally devious characters to highlight its moral core, Melville’s persistent ambiguity feels deeply Gallic.

Another difference between Le Doulosand the American cinema it referenced was its explicit portrayal of violence. In one infamous scene, Silien visciously beats Maurice’s girlfriend (Monique Hennessy), ties her by the neck to a radiator and throws whiskey in her face before interrogating her. The blunt, uncompromising brutality is exactly the sort that would find wider purchase in later crime films, in America and in Europe. In 1962, however, it was a bolt from the blue.

Just as Le Doulos was inspired by the US crime cinema that preceded it, the film’s distinctly visceral, hyper-tense style had an equal influence on future US crime films in return. Indeed, Melville’s heady combination of moody tropes from classic US noir and the rawer French style, which mixed equally chic mise-en-scène with hints of documentary vividness, still holds a huge sway with American directors.

Martin Scorsese, for example, has cited Le Doulos as an influence. In preparation for filming The Irishman (2019), Scorsese screened it to his own director of photography Rodrigo Prieto. “For the tone of the movie, I wanted it to be contemplative and it had to be an intimate epic,” he told fellow director Spike Lee in an on-stage discussion around its release. “So I showed a couple of Jean-Pierre Melville films. I showed Le Doulos and Le deuxième soufflé. It’s a very different world, but I like the understatement of it.”

Tarantino is another high-profile admirer. When asked by interviewer Josh Becker about the inspirations for his 1992 debut film Reservoir Dogs, he replied: “It’s like the films of Jean-Pierre Melville, Bob le flambeur, Le Doulos, which is my favourite screenplay of all time, with Jean-Paul Belmondo; it’s fantastic.” Reservoir Dogs certainly borrowed Le Doulos’s style, but more specifically its finale is an echo of Melville’s, with a trio of men shooting each other dead, and all over a betrayal.

Le Doulos still stands today as one of the great crime films of the post-war years. In hindsight, it feels like a pivot point on which the crime films before and after turn, marking the genre’s transition from the melodramatic to coolly brutal. Pessimism on screen has never looked so good since; the city forever a lonely, rain-soaked place where death is waiting to collect and betrayal is always just around the corner.

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January 17, 2023