October 2025 – The Magnificent 60s

Dead Heat on a Merry Go Round (1966) ****

Highly entertaining woefully underrated heist picture with an impish James Coburn (Hard Contract, 1967), Swedish Camilla Sparv (Downhill Racer, 1969) in a sparkling debut and at the end an outrageous twist you won’t see coming in a million years. This is the antithesis of capers of the Topkapi (1964) variety. Not only is it an all-professional job, it takes a good while before you even realise the final focus is robbery or even the actual location. There are hints about the that event and glimpses in passing of material that may be used, and although the theft is planned to intricate detail, none of that planning is revealed to the audience.

The paroled Eli Kotch (James Coburn), who has seduced the prison psychiatrist, immediately skips town and starts fleecing any woman who falls for his charms. He changes personality at the drop of a hat, fitting into the likes of the mark, and in turn is burglar, art thief, car hijacker, in order to raise the loot required to buy a set of bank plans, and yet not above taking on ordinary jobs like shoe salesman to meet the ladies and coffin escort to get free travel across the country. So adept at the minutiae of the con he even manages to impersonate a hotel guest in order to get free phone calls.

He enrols girlfriend Inger (Camilla Sparv) to act as an amateur photographer working on a “poetic essay on transient populations” to get an idea of sites he means to access. He manages to have the head of a Secret Service detail blamed for a leak. Everything is micro-managed and his final masquerade is an Australian cop with a prisoner to extradite which provides him with an excuse to linger in a police station, privy to what is going on at crucial points.

If I tell you any more I’m going to give away too much of the plot and deprive you of delight at its cleverness. The original posters did their best not to give away too much but you can rely on critics on Imdb to spoil everything.

This is just so much fun, with the slick confident Eli as a very engaging con man, the supreme manipulator, and almost in cahoots with writer-director Bernard Girardin (The Mad Room, 1969) in manipulating the audience. There are plenty films full of obfuscation just for the hell of it, or because plots are so complex there’s no room for simplification, or simply at directorial whim. But this has so much going on and Kotch so entertaining to watch that you hardly realize the tension that has been building up, not just looking forward to what exactly is the heist but also how are they going to pull it off, what other clever tricks does Kotch have up his sleeve for any eventuality, and of course, for the denouement, are they going to get away with it, or fall at the last hurdle. There is a great twist before the brilliant twist but I’m not going to tell you about that either.

There’s plenty Swinging Sixties in the background, the permissive society that Kotch is able to exploit, and yet the film has some unexpected depths. You wonder if the memories Kotch draws upon to win the sympathy of his female admirers have their basis in his own life. You are tempted to think not since he is after all a con man, but the detail is so specific it has you thinking maybe this is where his inability to trust anyone originates.

Bernard Giradin was not a name known to me I have to confess, since he was more of a television director than a big screen purveyor – prior to this he had made A Public Affair (1962) with the unheard-off Myron McCormick – and Coburn was the only big star he ever had the privilege to direct. But there are some nice directorial touches. The movie opens with a wall of shadows, there are some striking images of winter, a twist on bedroom footsie, and jabbering translators. But most of all he has the courage to stick to his guns, not feeling obliged to have Kotch spill out everything to a colleague or girl, either to boast of his brilliance, or to reveal innermost nerves, or, worse, to fulfil audience need. There’s an almost documentary feel to the whole enterprise.

James Coburn is superb. Sure, we get the teeth, the wide grin, but I sometimes felt all the smiling was unnecessary, almost a short cut to winning audience favour, and this portrayal, with the smile less in evidence, feels more intimate, more seductive. This may well be his best, most winning, performance. Camilla Sparv is something of a surprise, nothing like the ice queen of future movies, very much an ordinary girl delighted to be falling in love, and with a writer of all the things, the man of her dreams.

The excellent supporting cast includes Marian McCargo (The Undefeated, 1969), Aldo Ray (The Power, 1968), Robert Webber (The Dirty Dozen, 1967), Todd Armstrong (Jason and the Argonauts, 1963) and of course a blink-and-you-miss-it appearance of Harrison Ford as the only bellboy (that’s a clue) in the picture. You might also spot showbiz legend Rose Marie (The Jazz Singer, 1927).

Regretting You (2025) ****

It’s my own fault, I suppose. There’s probably no need to try and cram in as many movies as possible on my weekly visit to the cinema. I generally aim to catch two but, more usually, if the timings of showings align, I can see three. But, honestly, I’m fed up of posting two-star reviews of movies that have come garlanded with critical praise and some prize from a film festival.

So, let me get the duds out of the way first. I hadn’t expected a great deal from Good Fortune (2025) and that was just as well because it was awful, nary a laff, and some pious virtue-signaling sermon about the wealthy vs the workers.

I had expected much more from Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere (2025). I’m a big fan of movies (and books) about creative endeavor, be they concerning painters, sculptors, writers and rock stars. But I have to confess I’ve never seen Brucie in concert and I’ve probably owned only ever owned a couple of albums, and one of those would probably be a greatest hits compendium.

And I’ve never seen The Bear so Jeremy Allen White is new to me. But this was just so boring, an angst-ageddon, consisting mostly of the character looking mournful. It was more like an extended Classic Albums documentary and although it followed the same trajectory as the Bob Dylan picture of a singer changing his career path, it was still just dull. Yes, it’s a shout-out for people with mental health problems, but, hey, that’s still a documentary and forgive me for going against the grain here but White hasn’t an ounce of the charisma of Timothy Chamalet, who, when the camera bores into his soulful face, you want to know what he’s thinking. So another virtue-signaling effort that I doubt will connect with anyone but the Brucies.

So that brings me to Regretting You, the picture of which I had least expectations on my weekly Monday outing to the multiplex. And it was, as it happened, last on the agenda, so I came at it not at all anticipating that it would save the day.

And it’s not, thank goodness, what used to be called a “woman’s picture” because the two male leads are giving plenty rope and, in some regard, actually have the stronger emotional scenes. But all the characters come across as real and there’s none of the jazzing up of narrative by someone opening a flower shop or a café. And there’s a very reflective attitude to sex, which may be woke-inspired, but certainly leans more into character than I would have expected.

The story is quite simple. Opposites attract and find that actually they’re not as attracted as all that in the lifetime sense and then swing back to people with the same attitudes to life and chaos ensues.

Outgoing uninhibited muscular jock Chris (Scott Eastwood) marries quiet reflective Morgan (Allison Williams) rather than the equally fun-loving Jenny (Willa Fitgerald). Way down the marital line after Jenny has had a baby with their college pal Jonah (Dave Franco), Chris and Jenny have an affair that only comes to light when they die together in a car crash.

Dependable Morgan doesn’t want to detract from her 17-year-old daughter Clara’s (Mackenna Grace) adoration of her beloved father so keeps this aspect from her. In her grief, though possibly just as a normal rebellious teen, Clara starts acting up, cue endless rows, and getting too chummy with Miller (Mason Thames) who comes from the wrong side of the tracks and complicated by the fact that he’s got a girlfriend to dump first before he can get it on with Clara.

Surprisingly, this is a lot more about grief than romance. The Clara-Miller entanglement is very chaste and even more slowburn is widow and widower discovering they have feelings for each other.

But romance definitely takes second place to grief. Clara can’t face attending her father’s funeral and skips it, much to her mother’s fury. Morgan can’t face sleeping in the same bed as her deceitful husband and spends nights on the sofa sipping wine. Jonah begins to believe that his son is the result of the affair and pushes the child away, unable to bear the baby’s smile that he believes is the spitting image of Chris. And everyone has to work out their grief.

The Clara-Miller romance is idiosyncratically, and therefore believably, done. Even more believable is his reaction when he realizes Clara wants sex in revenge against her mother.

The acting is a bit too television, overmuch dependance on gesticulation and face contortion, but otherwise solid enough.

Allison Williams (Megan, 2002) holds it all together as the dependable mother who only breaks out to refurbish the house. Dave Franco (Love Lies Bleeding, 2024) reveals a gentler, aspect to his work. Mackenna Grace (Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, 2024) has the showiest part, but doesn’t revel in it. Mason Thames (How to Train Your Dragon, 2025) is also good value.

In fact, what comes over best is restraint, the widow and young lover holding onto the realities of the characters they play, rather than over-acting.

Directed with some skill by Josh Boone (The Fault in Our Stars, 2014). Written by Susan McMartin (After, 2019) from the Colleen Hoover bestseller.

While this doesn’t pack the dramatic intensity of the previous Hoover adaptation It Ends With Us (2024), it deals with the subject of grief in a sensitive manner.

I might be marking this up a tad in reaction to the pair of duds I saw first, but I think not too much. It delivers a solid enjoyable experience, and isn’t preaching, which, in itself, is rare these days.

Behind the Scenes: The L-Shaped Street of Dreams, Part II

In theory by the time I discovered the cavernous Green’s Playhouse – the largest cinema in Europe with 4,368 seats and nearly double the size of any other picture house in the city – it should have been entering a cinematic twilight zone. Its glory days were long gone. Situated at the top of Renfield St, which itself sat at a 90-degree angle to Sauchiehall St (thus forming the L-Shape of the title), it had, on opening in 1927, been the epitome of luxury, built with remarkable foresight by the Green family, rather than one of the major chains, ushering in the era of the “super cinema” just in time to meet the demand for the Talkies.

Seats were color-coded according to price and there were “Golden Divans” in boxes for courting couples. It stood out at night through an electric-bulb vertical American-style sign. Business boomed until post-war the cinema began losing out to the major chains in the competition for the best films. By the time I made my first visit it was surviving on exploitation and horror. It was the shabbiest of giants, carpets torn, seats badly in need of reupholstering and a distinct lack of atmosphere.

The only time I ever witnessed anything approaching a full house was for a screening of a full-length showing of the European Cup Final of 1967 when Glasgow’s Celtic beat Inter Milan. But there was a light around the corner in the form of pop concerts and its size allowed it to take over from the Odeon as the venue of choice for touring bands. My best memories are not of seeing a great movie there but of watching a roster of the top bands, The Rolling Stones, The Who and Elton John. It’s the only city center venue which continued plying its trade as a movie merchant and eventually was turned into the Cineworld multiplex, the busiest cinema in Britain.

About 100 yards down Renfield St on the same side of the road was the 1314-seat Regent. Originally, in 1911 it was less than half that size, built for comfort over one storey with stadium seating. Remodelled in 1920 it gained an extra floor and partly by installing a balcony doubled the seating. It was very thrifty where the lobby was concerned. You were virtually at the ticket desk the minute you stepped through the frontage.

It was the only cinema I knew where the programme showed the times of the trailers and newsreels. Like the Playhouse its days of vying for top product with the Odeon, ABC Regal and La Scala were long gone. Now it was primarily a second-run establishment and virtually the minute a movie completed its allocated assignation at the Odeon it was shipped into the Regent. Once in a while, by local mandate, it showed a new film. As long as you were willing to wait a week or possibly two, you could see a top film for less money. It was very comfortable and well run.

Less than 20 yards further down, on the same side of the road, was the majestic 2784-seat Odeon, certainly from the outside the most stylish of the city center houses thanks to its Art Deco design. Oddly enough, despite the Odeon chain’s association with Art Deco, it wasn’t built by Odeon. Instead it was commissioned by the American Paramount organization, at a time when studios also owned cinemas, opening on 31 December, 1934.

It was Glasgow’s first free-standing cinema built from scratch rather than being a conversion of an existing building. It was the size of a city block. As well as erecting the largest neon sign the city had ever seen atop the building, it also imported another American idea, a box office outside the cinema. At the outbreak of war Paramount sold the operation to Odeon and it became its Scottish flagship. This was the key first-run location for films by United Artists, Twentieth Century Fox, Disney and Columbia. Such was the demand for screenings that hardly any films during the 1960s – the Bonds a notable exception – were held over for a second week, in part because Rank had to feed movies into its suburban circuits.

In 1970 the cinema was tripled, which allowed the cinema to double as a roadshow house, and operate more strategically, by switching movies from the bigger to the smaller cinemas to extend their city center runs. It opened with Cromwell in roadshow at Odeon 1, Airport at Odeon 2 and The Virgin and the Gypsy at Odeon 3. Theoretically this increased the flow of films through the Odeon operation, but in reality as often, when two or three long-runners came along at once, the system ground to a halt. I became very familiar with this operation when I had my first stint as a critic, reviewing films for the Glasgow University Guardian.

Another 50 yards down the street on the opposite side of the road was one of my favorite hangouts – the Classic – which, as the name suggests, specialized in reruns of old pictures. Much as I enjoyed spending time checking out the reissues, I would have loved to have been around for its initial iteration when it was known as Cranston’s De Luxe Cinema, an 850-seater opened in 1916 by the same Miss Cranston whose tearooms had been designed by renowned Scottish architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

It occupied the third floor of a stylish six-storey building and screened first-run movies in opulent fashion. When business declined after the Second World War it was sold twice, first to the Greens who added a newsreel cinema. Classic bought it over in 1960 and ran it as a repertory house, adding late night films. You felt like you were climbing to the stars, it was a long haul to enter but it was well upholstered inside and they ran a huge range of older films, often double bills and sometimes changing the programme midweek. It was far more useful in my movie education than the arthouse. In 1969 the venue added a smaller operation, the Tatler, showing sexier fare as a “members only” club. It only came into being because the Grand Central in Jamaica St had folded in 1966 (it reopened in 1973 giving Glasgow three soft porn emporiums).

That was the saddest decline tale of any of the Glasgow cinemas. Opened in 1915, the 750-seat Grand Central was an instant hit, classy enough to have an orchestra and technically the first city cinema to feature sound, which emanated from records playing simultaneously with the film. Even when it hit tougher times in the 1950s it attempted to go down the arthouse route but eventually succumbed to sexploitation

The connecting roads of Sauchiehall St and Renfield St should form the boundary for my L-Shaped Street of Dreams but if I had continued about a mile in a straight line from the end of Renfield St I would come to another palace of splendor, a roadshow kingdom, home to 70mm and Cinerama two-shows-a-day advance bookable productions which, like The Dirty Dozen (1967) and Where Eagles Dare (1968) enjoyed nine-month runs. The Coliseum opened in 1905 as a music hall seating 2893 over three levels. It became a cinema in 1925 and played host in 1929 to the first talkie The Jazz Singer which caused a sensation. In 1962, reducing eating capacity to 1300 after an expensive revamp, it reopened as the only cinema in Scotland showing Cinerama.

Behind the Scenes: The L-Shaped Street of Dreams

We all did it – or so I’m guessing. Head into our city center and take a long walk past all the big cinemas and stare at the posters and stills on display outside the cinema and peek inside to the far wall where was a smaller poster for what was coming next week. Of course, we could just have checked out the daily newspaper and spotted what each house was offering. But that wasn’t the same.

In Glasgow, Scotland, where I grew up, the main cinemas were conveniently situated along an L-Shaped drag of the city’s two chief shopping districts that ran for about a mile, abutted by the two main train stations, Charing Cross at one end, and the terminus of Central Station at the other. On Saturday afternoons I’d hop on a bus into town and take a stroll down my L-Shaped Street of Dreams.

Glasgow was a moviegoing mecca. It boasted the biggest cinema audiences in the whole of Britain on a per-head-of-population basis. Where Londoners might attend the cinema once every two months, Glaswegians turned up every two or three weeks. Green’s Playhouse was the biggest cinema in Britain and when the Odeon turned into a triple that was the busiest complex in Britain (a position that the Cineworld in Renfrew St held until its recent closure).

As far as this initial interest in moviegoing went, I’m talking the late 1960s/early 1970s, just at the start of multiplexing – the first of that breed appearing in 1967 and the second in 1970. And, unlike today, movies opened on a Monday for a six-day run with Sundays given over to a separate one-day double bill, usually of the exploitation/horror variety and generally an oldie. There were no split weeks in the city center movie houses. At the time of which I speak, the program changed every week. It was rare in the 1960s for a movie to be retained (held over) for a second week and even rarer for a third. Though that changed with the advent of the blockbuster in the 1970s when Love Story (1970), The Godfather (1972) and Jaws (1975) ran for months in one city center first run.

I always began my cinematic ramble in Sauchiehall St at the Charing Cross end which afforded me the opportunity, first of all, to peer into the relatively discreet windows of the Curzon Classic and take note of the risqué fare. This was by default an arthouse when the sexiest pictures available before the onset of more permissive movies all came from Europe. So, occasionally, you’d find it playing host to a genuine arty number that happened to contain whatever degree of nudity the British censor would permit. Eventually, it fessed up and became a members-only cinema where it could show whatever it wanted – though still within the strictures of the British Board of Film Censors, which meant no hard-core. Still, you were guaranteed that every movie shown was X-certificate.

The 450-seater Curzon Classic began life in 1912 as the Vitagraph before being renamed the Kings. In 1954, as the Newscine, it became the first cinema to specialize in newsreels. But that didn’t last long and, renamed Newcine, turned into a second-run house. The Classic chain, which ran a repertory outfit showing reissues, bought it in 1964. But this particular cinema strayed outside the normal Classic chain fare of older movies and tended to screen the kind of movies I mentioned.

A few hundred yards along and you came to the ABC Regal, one of the two biggest first run houses and local flagship of the ABC circuit. I learned much later on that the two most important British chains – the ABC and the Odeon – had separate exclusive deals with major Hollywood studios. So the ABC would only show pictures made by MGM, Paramount, Universal and Warner Bros while its rival ran pictures made by Twentieth Century Fox, Disney, Columbia and United Artists.

The Regal was one of the city’s first “super-cinemas,” opening on 13 November, 1929. The site had been entertainment-based since 1875 and successively had traded as the Diorama, The Panorama, the Ice Skating Palace (also showing movies from 1896) and The Hippodrome. For a quarter of a century from 1904 it hosted Hengler’s Circus and briefly was the Waldorf Palaise de Dance. The Regal had 2,359 seats. It changed its name to the ABC Regal in 1959. Occasionally, it doubled up as a roadshow house, My Fair Lady (1964) running there for several months.

In 1967 it was split in two. The Regal was renamed the ABC 1 and its more luxurious partner, a 922-seater, the ABC 2. The former continued to change its program every week but the latter was a roadshow venue, so movies ran there at least for a month – Ryan’s Daughter (1970) held the record of lasting a full year. Some pictures which went out on general release and on a 35mm print in the USA were blown up to 70mm and road shown in Britain, and it was here and in that format I saw The Wild Bunch (1969).

When roadshow was in short supply or an earlier movie had not performed to expectations and its run was curtailed, the ABC 2 would put on reruns of previous roadshow successes – in 1968 The Great Race (1965), Battle of the Bulge (1965) and Becket (1964) all had one-week stints in continuous performance.

Having a reputation for the moviegoing habit did not ensure that films arrived any faster in Glasgow. All movies of any distinction had their first showings in Britain in London’s West End and rarely went north until both that run was complete and it had played the North London and South London circuits.

Just round the corner from the ABC, off Sauchiehall St, in Rose St, was the Cosmo (reborn as the Glasgow Film Theatre in 1974). Not only was Glasgow viewed as a vibrant city for Hollywood pictures, but it was also reckoned to be a prime target for alternative cinema. Built in 1939, the Cosmo was the first purpose-built arthouse outside of London. Owned by George Singleton the 850-seater arthouse had a quirky “Mr Cosmo” logo.

As well as a weekly change of program of largely foreign movies, the Cosmo also occasionally hosted roadshows. While not falling in with the standard 70mm format, the Cosmo maintained the separate performance element of the roadshow. In 1967 it premiered the Burton-Taylor Shakespeare extravaganza The Taming of the Shrew, which lasted 12 weeks, and the Oscar-winning A Man for All Seasons which held court for eight weeks.

Further along Sauchiehall St was the 1,000-seat La Scala, dating from 1936 and, famously, with a café on the ground floor. This was the flagship for Caledonian Associated Cinemas, a chain that had more cinemas throughout Scotland than either ABC or Odeon and therefore was in a strong position to negotiate for first-run product. First-run pictures often enjoyed a two-week engagement here. Generally, it alternated between first and second run, pictures receiving a repeat outing a week or so after finishing a run at the ABC or Odeon. Occasionally, it went roadshow, it was separate performances in 1968 for a four-week run of Doctor Zhivago after its initial roadshow outing in the city. In the early 1970s when ABC was in dispute with Paramount over its rental terms, the La Scala obtained the rights to Love Story (1970) and it ran at the cinema on continuous performance for 26 weeks.

Opposite the La Scala was – until the ABC2 came along – Glasgow’s city center roadshow kingpin, the Gaumont, the Rank/Odeon chain’s roadshow flagship, which had played host to The Sound of Music for 134 weeks. Originally it was part of the Gaumont chain before being subsumed by Rank and merged with its existing Odeon circuit. It had opened in 1910 as The Picture House with a capacity of 1,084-seats and later expanded to accommodate 1,600 patrons. It was taken over by Gaumont in 1929 but the original name was retained until 1947. It became the city’s de facto venue for roadshows after being chosen to premiere Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1956) in a run lasting four months and became internationally famous when South Pacific (1958) ran there for 18 months. Occasionally, it reverted to short runs in continuous performance such as, in 1968, Sgt Ryker with Lee Marvin.

This takes me to the halfway point of my stroll along my L-Shaped Street of Dreams. Next time I’ll be taking a turn both left and right from Sauchiehall St and going both up and down Renfield St.

Nine Bodies in a Mexican Morgue (2025) or ** (depending)

Ludicrous production values point this in the direction of a laughable project, but a clever twist on both the detection picture and the survival genre and a heck of a lot of fun once it gets into the swing tilt this into the So Bad It’s Good category and a four-star rating for that.

Maybe there’s some of that post-ironic modernist stuff flying around in that we’re not meant to take the setting seriously. How could you when the only attempts to fill out the background of the Mexican jungle are one snake, one lizard and one crow and a pool of barracuda (yep, you heard me, somebody’s got to be able to chew off, for narrative purposes, a human face). Occasionally, reminiscent of the worst of the B-picture horror movies where actors had to strangle themselves with plastic snakes, here the characters take it in turns to slap their faces at supposed insects.

*Other morgues you might be interested in…*

But they’re never covered in sweat and there’s nary a tarantula or rattlesnake in sight. And any time one of them is due to be bumped off, they just have to wander away from camp.

This sets out its stall in disaster movie fashion. In classics like The Poseidon Adventure (1972), The Towering Inferno (1074) and Earthquake (1974) part of the fun was working out who would bite the dust.

Here, we’re told at the outset that out of the ten people aboard a light aircraft that’s crashed into the jungle nine don’t make it. So, over six episodes, we’ve got to guess who’s the survivor as well as why he or she feels obliged to get rid of his fellow passengers and it’s not as simple as in Sands of the Kalahari (1965) where it’s simply to increase one individual’s food stock.

Nor is it a simple matter of checking the billing. We know that Paul Newman and Steve McQueen aren’t going to be victims in The Towering Inferno, likewise Charlton Heston in Earthquake, but here none of the cast is familiar in the slightest, so no fans are going to bitch at their beloved idol being killed off, though Game of Thrones showed little compunction.

*“The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue” should you be interested.*

Naturally, the one creature that’s dominant in the jungle is the red herring. Virtually every character isn’t what they seem. Kevin (Eric McCormack), an ex-doctor, feels like somewhere along the line he’s been struck off; Zack (David Ajala) is certainly no insurance investigator; Dan (Adam Long) isn’t a novelist; millionaire’s daughter Amy (Jan Le) clearly has issues; Lisa (Siobhan MacSweeney) ain’t no ordinary housewife; and everyone’s suspicious of Sonja (Lydia Wilson) because she’s so guarded.

Alliances crumble once the body count rises. And gradually, the survivors realize they are not alone, there’s someone else in this neck of the jungle who will sabotage their efforts to set up a rudimentary transmitter. It’s not Flight of the Phoenix (1965) either or those others in the survival sub-genre where characters use their skills to find an escape. This lot do nothing more energetic than wait. Though they don’t have much energy left over after all their confrontations and squabbling over who’s the killer among them.

What writer Anthony Horowitz (Foyle’s War, 2002-2025) does brilliantly is take the hoary old detective tale and turn it upside down. Sure, we’re accustomed to multiple murders in virtually any episode of a television mystery, but setting the bar as high as nine killings, and telling us that fact from the off, making us wonder who will be next – a bit like Strictly, wondering who will be axed this week – provides this with the narrative fillip it requires.

And you forget about the lousy production values and go with the flow. Here and there sub-plots turn up the puzzle factor.

You may well, like me (he boasted), work out who the killer is and what he’s up to, but likely as not you won’t.

Apart from a marvelous turn from Siobhan MacSweeny, the dry head nun from the Derry Girls (2018) television series, nobody’s called upon to do much acting, except of the duplicitous kind as they keep their real characters under wraps.

Couple of good twists at the end.

Guilty pleasure (four-stars) or utter rubbish (two stars) – you choose.

Catch it on BBC and various streamers or on DVD.

Eden (2025) ****

By all accounts this should be a stinker. Colossal box office flop without little potential redemption in the form of critical accolades. Mis-sold as a horror survival thriller with too upscale a cast for that strategy to work. And yet it gives the likes of After the Hunt and Roofman an object lesson is how to make unlikeable characters appealing.

There’s no great secret. Just don’t hide anything. Make your characters upfront from the outset and let them roll the dice without artifice. Solve any puzzles. Set out your stall fairly and go with it. And you know what, put any random characters anywhere and you’ll trigger a battle for power.

This would be in the vein of Lord of the Flies (1963), Robinson Crusoe (1997 the most recent version) and Cast Away (2000), except the characters here are on a remote island by choice, sold on the notion of getting away from a civilization which is in a bad way, this being 1932 and the world in a spiral of financial depression and rising fascism.

Wannabe philosopher Ritter (Jude Law), determined to change the world, is narked when, three years into his sojourn on Galapagos, his hardly idyllic isolation with partner Dore (Vanessa Kirby) is interrupted by the arrival of fanboy Heinz (Daniel Bruhl), wife Margret (Sydney Sweeney) and ill son Harry (Jonathan Tittel).

Somewhat surprised at the unfriendly welcome, Heinz would be astonished to learn that Ritter suggests they go live in, unknown to them, one of the worst spots on the island, assuming they won’t survive and he can go back to peace and quiet. But the newcomers have come prepared for hardship and build a home and convert a spring into a home-made pool.

A grudging truce is shattered by the arrival of the Baroness (Ana de Armas), her two lovers Rudolph (Felix Kammerer) and Robert (Toby Wallace), and her wildly ambitious plans to build a luxury hotel. Worse, she’s determined to seize power, forcing those further down the society tree to bend the knee, and if her sex appeal doesn’t achieve that purpose, then she’ll take the old-fashioned route. Heinz kisses her outstretched hand but Ritter refuses. She’s a particularly ruthless specimen and when her supply of food runs out just steals from Heinz’s horde then has the audacity to invite him to a meal featuring the stolen food.

Her plan to set Ritter and Heinz against each other, her barbed tongue a singular weapon, only results in them forming an alliance. While it’s obvious it’s not going to end well, three sequences in particular are distinctly brutal.

Along the way, facades are broken. The Baroness has invented her title. Hunger is all it takes for Ritter to shift from his avowed vegetarianism leaving Dore is appalled. Her beloved donkey is killed. Heinz has to face up to the fact that Margret only married him to get away from home. After Heinz and Ritter conspire against the Baroness, Margret and Dore conspire against Ritter.

It’s about 15 minutes too long, the seeming need to wrap up the tale unnecessary, but the rest of it is a joy to watch. There’s one absolute cracker of a sequence. While Margret is giving birth alone and threatened by feral wild dogs, the Baroness pointedly ignores her plight, not surprising since she has more important matters on her mind, namely her lovers looting of Heinz’s stores.

I had not expected much in the way of performances. Daniel Bruhl (Rush, 2013) would at least be solid, but after Black Rabbit (2025) I thought Jude Law would be way over the top and the two actresses, struggling for critical acceptance, way out of their depth. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Jude Law goes back to the quiet brooding intensity that made him a star in the first place. Ana de Armas (Ballerina, 2025) steals the show as the arch manipulator, her mind quick enough to rescue any dire situation. Sydney Sweeney (Anyone But You, 2023) turns her screen persona on its head, famed cleavage kept under cover, as the stalwart, almost puritanical, wife.

While this might seem a bit of a come-down for Oscar-winning director Ron Howard after box office and critical hits like The Da Vinci Code (2006) and A Beautiful Mind (2002) and making do with stars of a lower marquee class than Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks and in their day Russell Crowe, Mel Gibson and Jim Carrey, he’s tackled similar obsession before with In the Heart of the Sea (2015).

And he’s great with the cast, knocks over-acting on the head, so that every performance looks perfectly pitched and in keeping with the characters. The directing, too, is spot-on. Powerful scenes, such as the Baroness’s failed seduction of a millionaire explorer and a poisoning, are played in a low key. Written by Howard and Noah Pink (Tetris, 2023)

A shade too long, as I said, but several cuts above the likes of After the Hunt, Roofman and One Battle after Another.

What used to be called a sleeper.

Catch it on Amazon.

The Power (1968) ***

Low budget sci-fi effort that had little chance in the box office stakes that year up against the big budget psychedelic 2001: A Space Odyssey and the visceral Planet of the Apes. Producer George Pal and director Byron Haskin, the key figures behind War of the Worlds (1953), would later become among the most exalted in the sci-fi genre, but the cult of the 1950s sci-fi movies did not exist yet. Yet if made today, we would be treating this as an origin story with a sequel already in the works and creation of its own universe on the cards.

As the budget can only accommodate a few explosions and a derisory number of tiny special effects, emphasis is placed on imagination as the source of tension. The uncanny remaining unexplained helps ensure mystery remains character-driven. Wisely, the film makers steer clear of providing any detail on the strange force.

It begins with the neat title “Tomorrow.” As part of a planned space program, a team of scientists experimenting on the limits of human endurance discover that one of them has unusual powers. As a group they are able to make revolve a piece of paper attached to a vertical pencil without establishing who is the driving force. When Professor Hallson (Arthur O’Connell) is found dead in a centrifuge, the only clue being a scrap of paper bearing the name Adam Hart, suspicion falls on the other members. Professor Tanner (George Hamilton) is dismissed when the investigation discovers his credentials are fraudulent.

Seeking to prove his innocence, Tanner goes on the run before establishing that the main suspects are the mysterious Adam Hart and three of the original team – military chief Nordlund (Michael Rennie), Professor Scott (Earl Holliman) and Tanner’s girlfriend Professor Lansing (Suzanne Pleshette). But he is mostly baffled by the goings-on which include being dumped in an air force target range. He could be the culprit but again so many odd occurrences take place when others are present that it would be hard to pin the blame on Tanner. As the corpses begin to pile up, the list of potential suspects naturally decreases.

A toy winks at Tanner, walls appear were there were none before, a man is convinced Tanner is someone else (not Hart), a high-flying professor’s wife lives in a trailer, characters collapse under psychic assault, a young woman trying to seduce an old man discovers she is kissing a corpse, the imagery appears inspired by Salvador Dali and Hieronymus Bosch, and you could easily argue that Tanner’s academic records have been deliberately erased. On the more prosaic side, the cops are next to useless, there’s a car chase and a sequence in a lift shaft, but the bulging eyeballs suggested in the posters are a marketeer’s invention. There’s even a clever joke, Tanner misreading a newspaper headline “Don’t Run” as being a message to him.

The oddities are sufficiently off-beam to appear as figments of the imagination and it certainly seems Tanner suffers from hallucinations. And there are some deliciously off-key characters, an old woman obsessed with fly-swatting, a sultry waitress. If Hart is the superhuman then experiments may have taken place long before now. In his hometown, people still act on instructions Hart handed out a decade before and accomplices are in place such as Professor Van Zandt (Richard Carlson).

Adding to the mood are philosophic discussions about the existence (as already a fait accompli) of a superhuman: some want to clone him, others would happily submit to him.

Byron Haskin (Conquest of Space, 1955) and George Pal ( The Time Machine, 1960) have marshalled their puny resources with exceptional skill, down to hiring as leading man George Hamilton (Your Cheatin’ Heart, 1964), so far from being a big star at the time that audiences would not automatically assume he had to be the good guy, and peopling the production with names from 1950s sci-fi like Michael Rennie (The Day the Earth Stood Still, 1951) and Richard Carlson (Creature from the Black Lagoon, 1954).

George Hamilton, in the days before the perma-tan became his calling card, is surprisingly good and the supporting cast does what a good supporting cast should do. Suzanne Pleshette (Nevada Smith, 1966) convinces as the lover who could be the cool killer. Also look out for 1940s glamor puss Yvonne De Carlo and a staple of The Munsters television series (1964-1966), Aldo Ray (Johnny Nobody, 1960) and Miko Taka (Walk, Don’t Run, 1966).

Perhaps the biggest coup was the recruitment of triple Oscar-winner Miklos Rosza (Ben-Hur, 1959) who provided a memorable score.

In most sci-fi films, the danger is readily identified. Here, you might hazard a guess but whenever you come close some clever sleight-of-hand misdirects. For most of the time I was happily intrigued, enough coming out of left field to provide distraction. This is a masterclass in how extract the most from very little.

After The Hunt (2025) *

Don’t you hate it when directors want to have their cake and eat it? Effectively, this is a fairly humdrum MeToo thriller but looks like it’s written by a dozen op-ed columnists taking aim at half a dozen targets, populated by little more than cliche characters, wrapped up in a fog of pretension, and spectacularly sabotaged by a deus ex machina ending that no amount of Oscar-baiting can salvage.

Large gobbets of narrative are missed out, theoretically so we make up our minds about the characters but in reality because the director can’t make up his mind where he wants to go. When the director can’t make up his mind how to frame a scene he resorts to showing us hands.

So here’s the myriad scenarios at play. Married alpha female Alma (Julia Roberts), pushing 60, a philosophy professor, adored by her students, with whom she flirts at will, is battling a pushing-40s singleton rival Hank (Andrew Garfield), adored by his students, with whom he flirts at will, for a coveted tenure at Yale. Quite why Alma, at her age, hasn’t achieved tenure before is never explained. To help heat things up, Hank has the hots for the older woman.

Wealthy gay student Maggie (Ayo Edebiri) claims Hank raped her and he’s fired. Pressure is brought to bear on Alma to back Maggie. But there’s a twist. Or theoretically, there’s a twist. Hank is about to expose Maggie as a plagiarist so she’d use any excuse to get rid of him. Theoretically. And this is one of the many ways in which the picture ties itself up in knots because Maggie doesn’t know about Hank’s suspicions.

Maggie also knows Alma’s big secret because hunting in a toilet cabinet for toilet roll she finds taped to the underside of a shelf an envelope containing stuff that might (it later transpires) allow Maggie to happily set Hank up on the assumption Alma would take her side.

This he said/she said plays out to a mess of philosophy. The screenplay takes potshots at each generation in turn, the older one represented by Alma, the next one represented by Hank and the entitled younger contemporary one represented by Maggie who take up vicious arms against anyone who oppose their limited point-of-view, i.e. the cancel culture generation.

But there’s something wrong with Alma. She takes a couple of pills first thing in the morning and is prone to collapsing in pain. But being the philosophic sort, she’s a stoic and doesn’t tell faithful husband Frederik (Michael Stulbarg) and is popping other pills at other times. But she’s committed the grievous sin of not fully endorsing Maggie and the pupil has stirred up her friends to arms.

Given Alma’s been caught stealing a prescription and is hauled before the departmental authorities, it seems she’s for the high jump. But, lo, suddenly she’s handed a miraculous get-out-of-jail-free guard. Surrounded by baying students, she collapses. Naturally, this being the social media generation, this encounter is filmed. Turns out Alma has perforated ulcers. And the outcome is that the students end their opposition to her (in case, presumably, they are blamed for causing said collapse), and the department decides that stealing prescriptions can be swept under the carpet, so she gains tenure, Hank is cast out into the wilderness and Maggie transforms herself into a MeToo poster girl for Yale.

But that’s not even the barmiest part. Alma’s big secret is that, as an underage teenager, she was seduced by an older man. She only exposed him when he dropped her for another woman and he committed suicide. Despite common sense telling her that she was not to blame, she persists in wallowing in guilt, viewing the man who abused her as the victim of her wiles. Which just goes to show you can study Kierkagaard and philosophers till the cows come home but if it suits a barmy director’s narrative purpose you will end up being presented as dumb as all get-out.

So this all plays out against a backdrop of philosophical gibberish and Frederik’s jealousy of the attention lavished, by males and females alike, on his charismatic wife.

When a marketing team goes down the Oscar-bait route – see Dwayne Johnson and The Smashing Machine – and claims stunning acting is the reason for seeing a movie devoid of the more essential audience engagement you know you’re in for a rough ride.

Sure, both Julia Roberts (Ticket to Paradise, 2022) and Andrew Garfield (We Live in Time, 2024) have dumped their usual cuteness but it’s not enough to save the picture. Ayo Edebiri (Omni Loop, 2024) is left with no choice but to over-act. Directed by Luca Guadagnini (Challengers, 2024), written by Nora Garrett in her debut.

I saw four movies in two days and in all honesty Gabby’s Dollhouse best fulfilled audience expectation.

This is not just a complete dud but way past its meager theatrical run is going to annoy the hell out of everyone as marketeers and critics try to position Roberts as an Oscar contender.

The worst kind of lazy filmmaking.

Roofman (2025) **

This sounds like one of those scams you’re always reading about. Too-good-to-be-true handsome hunk Jeffrey Manchester (Channing Tatum) arrives in the life of struggling single mom Leigh (Kirsten Dunst). Only difference is he’s not ripping her off for cash, but demolishing her emotions and the faith in goodness of her two innocent kids, Jade (Kirana Kulic) and Joselyn (Gabriella Cila).

Another movie glorifying some dude you’ve never heard of, just because, at least in the movie version, he’s cute to the point of goofyness and for some reason has been left behind by society. And like Smashing Machine (2025), there’s virtually no narrative to hang onto or even that makes sense, beyond the delusion inflicted on the God-fearing family who can’t see past the armloads of gifts and fall too easily for the notion that’s he’s some kind of undercover government agent.

Maybe you can live for six months on peanut M&Ms, great piece of promotion for M&Ms should that be the case, and maybe the manager, Mitch (Peter Dinklage), of the Toys’R’Us store you’re hiding out in is so dumb he doesn’t realize boxes and boxes of the stuff is leaving the store without registering on his till. Or that his store is also being looted of all its computer game inventory.

And it’s true that Jeffrey has an unusual set of skills, and that if he stopped stealing for a moment and found an ordinary job anywhere someone would soon cotton on the fact that he’s a walking encyclopedia of observation and surely it wouldn’t be long before he could bring added-value to any business simply by pointing out such facts.

You could start off with the fact that he’s found a weak spot in the security of most businesses. Most stores have ample security at the front, but nobody’s given a thought to how accessible they might be from the roof for a guy armed with little more than a hammer.

But, wait, Jeffrey isn’t a bad guy’s bad guy, he’d be rejected by the likes of Martin Scorsese, he’s only turning to crime because he can’t afford to buy a bike for his kid. So bringing those observation skills to the fore, he works out that McDonalds is relatively easy prey and before he’s caught he’s collected tens of thousands of dollars in his own version of Happy Meals.

In prison he turns once more to his specific set of skills and in the only interesting scene in the entire picture escapes through an ingenious method, then holes up in a Toys’R’Us where he constructs a little hidey-hole, switches off the security alarms (another set of skills), and comes out to play every night when the store is closed.

Mitch is a hardass and makes life hard for that nice single mom Leigh so Jeffrey intervenes and amends her work schedule to better suit her domestic life. And when Mitch refuses to pony up with a donation for the toy charity event she’s hosting at the local church, Jeffrey steps in.

You wouldn’t know it but these little churches are packed full of single moms just gagging for it. No sooner has Leigh coaxed our hero out on a date than she’s having first-date sex and then, armed with armfuls of gifts, he’s pretty much invading the home, younger daughter delighted with his attention, older daughter a tougher nut to crack.

Are you still interested? I wasn’t. I sat there like a member of the famed Disgruntled Audience, wondering what made anyone imagine this no-story story was worth a good two hours of my time.

So criminals are actually ordinary guys at heart, wanting a home life like the rest of us, and not all going around abusing their wives or beating up on their kids of sitting home stoned?

That’s about as much insight as we’re going to get as long as we (the audience) go in for the delusion that it’s somehow going to have a happy ending.

I’m reminded of the Richard Pryor character in one of the Superman pictures who, despite some genius, was so dumb he was always going to get caught and couldn’t think of a single way outside of criminality to find a home for his set of special skills.

Sure, Channing Tatum (Blink Twice, 2024) is watchable but soon wears out his welcome in a tale that doesn’t go anywhere fast and Kirsten Dunst’s (Civil War, 2024) character has some surprising aspects. But really?

Derek Cianfrance has a decent track record for interesting drama – Blue Valentine (2010), The Place Beyond the Pines (2012) and The Light Between Oceans (2026) – but this is a serious miscalculation of audience endurance. Kirt Gunn (Lovely By Surprise, 2007) wrote it.

Dud.

Sands of the Kalahari (1965) ****

You know the score: plane crashes in inhospitable territory (in this case a desert), personalities clash as food/water is rationed, tempers run high and/or depression sets in as attempts to attract attention fail, someone goes for help, someone else has an ingenious idea and eventually everyone rallies round in common cause. That template worked fine in The Flight of the Phoenix (1965).

It doesn’t here. This is not quite as inhospitable. There is water. Caves offer shelter from the blazing sun. There is food – lizards trapped, game hunted with telescopic rifle. But the food is lean, not fattened through farming for human consumption. And you have to watch out for marauding baboons not to mention scorpions. And this group is split, two alpha males intent on exerting dominance with little interest in common cause.

*Producer Joseph E. Levine came up with the poster*
*without close examination of the picture’s content.*

Of the six survivors of this crash, Sturdevan (Nigel Davenport) decides his leadership status entitles him to sole claim over the only woman, Grace (Susannah York). But when he accepts the genuine responsibilities of leadership, he sets off across the desert to get help. That leaves Grace to fall into the hands of O’Brien (Stuart Whitman), so alpha he could be auditioning for Tarzan, shirt off all the time.

It soon transpires O’Brien has a rather unusual idea of survival – getting rid of his companions so that he will have no shortage of food until rescue arrives. It takes a while for the others to catch on to his plan. And then rather than common cause and camaraderie, it becomes every man/woman for himself, a battle for individual survival, a return to the primeval.

The most likely challenger to O’Brien’s authority is Bain (Stanley Baker), but he has been badly injured in the crash and no match for the other man’s brawn or his weapon. So it becomes a game of cat and mouse. Except it’s in the desert, it’s the law of the jungle and the rule of autocracy brought home with sudden force to people accustomed to the comforts of civilization and democracy.

The movie’s structure initially takes us down the obvious route of common purpose – Grimmelman (Harry Andrews) knows enough survival lore to devise a method of water transportation that would permit the group to escape the desert, Dr Bondrachai (Theodore Bikel) formulates a method of trapping lizards, and O’Brien, at least at first, appears willing to take on the role of protector, warding off baboons with his gun.

The change into something different is subtle. While the others are desperate to escape, it becomes apparent that O’Brien has found his metier. We discover little about the lives of each individual prior to being stranded. Whatever O’Brien’s standing in society, it would not have been as high as here, where his superior skills stand out. Reveling in his supremacy, he doesn’t particularly want to go home.

Like any psychopath Bain knows how to manipulate so at first it seems his decisions are for the greater good. And only gradually does it emerge that he blames others for his own mistakes and intends to eliminate his rivals for the food supply one by one. Because he is so handsome, it is impossible to believe he could be so devious or so evil.

The three principals all play against type. Stanley Baker (Zulu, 1963) and Stuart Whitman (Murder Inc., 1960) made their names playing heroic types. Here Baker is too ill for most of the picture to do any good and Whitman plays a ruthless killer. But Susannah York (Sebastian, 1968) is the big revelation. Audiences accustomed to her playing glamorous, perhaps occasionally feisty, gals will hardly recognize this portrayal of a coward, not just abjectly surrendering to the alpha male but seeking him out for protection and guilty of betrayal.

Even though this picture is set in the days before gender equality and the independent woman was a rarity, Grace’s acquiescence to the powerful male is disturbing, in part because it takes us back to the days when a woman was impotent in the face of male dominance. Such is York’s acting skill that rather than despise this woman, she earns our sympathy.

While for the most part Harry Andrews (Danger Route, 1967) and Nigel Davenport (Sebastian, 1968) appear in their usual screen personas of strong males, here their characters both are changed by the circumstances. Theodore Bikel (A Dog of Flanders, 1960) has the most interesting supporting role, the only one who takes delight in the adventure.

Director Cy Endfield (Zulu) – who also wrote the screenplay based on the William Mulvehill novel – delivers a spare picture. There is virtually no music, just image. Aerial shots show tiny figures in a landscape. The absence of character background frames the story in the present. As a reflection on the animal instinct, how close to the primordial a human being still operates, no matter how enlightened, this works exceptionally well, and melds allegory with thriller.