Across 110th Street (1972)

Jackie Brown is one of my all time favourite soundtracks and I always wanted to watch the movie where it took its opening/closing theme, ‘Across 110th Street’ by Bobby Womack. I was a little surprised to find that the melancholic, orchestral sweep of the song I know was not used in the title credit sequence […]

Close-Up (1990)

What a magic trick this movie is. An odd courtroom case is filmed by the camera, the person charged is studied in the frame, everyday people are asked to become actors and recreate what they experienced, and the result offers a complexity of meanings and readings, but also depending on your viewing experience, it also […]

The Magician (1958)

I was inspired to watch Ingmar Bergman’s The Magician (1958; Ansiktet) by Tracy Letts and Carrie Coon including it in an article for The AV Club where they planned a 24 hour film festival line up. When I read about Bergman, this film doesn’t come up as much as a title and it feels like […]

The Psychic (1977)

Italian horror maestro Lucio Fulci’s giallo thriller, The Psychic (1977; aka Seven Notes In Black, Sette Note In Nero, Murder To The Tune Of Seven Black Notes), received attention awhile back due to its great soundtrack by Franco Bixo, Fabio Frizzi, and Vince Tempera (listed as Bixo-Frizzi-Tempera); it was another score cannibalised by Quentin Tarantino […]

The Kid Detective (2020)

Tone is such a tricky thing to get it right, particularly when you are juggling tones while blurring genres. The Kid Detective (2020) begins with a goofy premise – a kid detective (like Encyclopaedia Brown) who solved neighbourhood crimes, now a washed up adult still solving “cases” – and eventually becomes one of my favourite […]