FILM FILINGS APRIL 2025

In this very belated April 2025 edition of Film Filings we have reviews of Soderbergh’s latest, Carl Franklin’s 1992 neo-noir One False Move reviewed by Chris Witty, Nathan Gilmore’s Sunday Reviews, and Sam Stephens investigates the filmic joy of a bad1948 classic.

POSS: BLACK BAG (2025) REVIEW

Over at his blog Jordan M. Poss reviews Steven Soderbergh’s spy thriller Black Bag. The new film harks back to a 1960s aesthetic—especially The Ipcress File with Michael Caine—but is unusual in other respects. Poss notes one of them is the characterization of its protagonists:

Another is Black Bag’s emphasis on character, which is also where it shows its unusual place among recent spy stories. With the exceptions of George and Kathryn, the spies of Black Bag lead loose, dissipated, unfulfilling lives: drinking too much, taking drugs, putting up with too much from their significant others, cheating behind their backs. These are not just personal flaws—what used to be called sins—but security risks. George’s conspicuously faithful monogamy, which baffles his fellow agents, turns out to be the only reliable thing in their chaotic world.

This, along with some of the real-world implications of the Severus plot, gives Black Bag a moral dimension that, it not unique in latter-day Hollywood, is as unusual as George and Kathryn’s marriage.

WITTY : ONE FALSE MOVE (1992) REVIEW

Over on his Instagram account FilmFolkUK, Chris Witty reviewed the 1992 crime classic penned by actor-screenwriter Billy Bob Thornton, directed by Carl Franklin, and starring Thornton, Bill Paxton, and Cynda Williams. Witty’s review in full:

The early 90s held a lot of promise for the rebirth of the intelligent crime picture, progressing from impressive action-orientated buddy cop movies like Lethal Weapon (1987) and Midnight Run (1988) to more gritty noir-tinged future genre classics like Reservoir Dogs (1992), and John Dahl's Red Rock West (1993) and The Last Seduction (1994). One of the leading lights was this: actor-turned-director Carl Franklin's introspective character study, One False Move, co-scripted by Billy Bob Thornton and Tom Epperson, who would work together again on numerous projects including Sam Raimi's The Gift (2000).

What starts out as a criminals-on-the-run police procedural steadily evolves into a picture unafraid to explore themes of racial and geographical divisions, with a duo of sadistic killers named Ray (white) and Pluto (Black) (chilling performances from Thornton and Michael Beach) dragging Ray's mixed race girlfriend Fantasia (Cynda Williams) along for the ride. They are on their way from L.A. to Chicago to finalise a drug deal, all the while pursued by salt and pepper LAPD detectives Dud and McFeeley (Jim Metzler and Earl Billings), both of whom are on their way to becoming older, wiser and more world weary. Fantasia wants to make a pit stop in Star City, Arkansas for a brief reunion with her five-year-old son. The police chief of Star City, Dale Dixon (Bill Paxton) anticipates their arrival, eagerly welcoming a chance to prove his mettle as a serious lawman. On his meeting with his LAPD counterparts, he comes across as naive, boyish, and, as a product of his environment, casually racist. Dud and McFeeley take him at face value, enjoy his wife's hospitality, and, because they don't want to see him come to harm, subtley discourage his involvement in the case.

In a lesser film, the contrast between the city cops and the country chief would have invited predictable stereotypes. We expect a modicum of corruption from two seasoned detectives working the streets of Los Angeles as much as we expect a total absence of grey in our good ol' boy Dale. Yet Thornton and Epperson's script, complimented by Franklin's nuanced direction, rewards us with so much more in the way of social commentary, adding layers to Dale's character that come to the fore in a tragic denouement. Even after the explosive climax, once the smell of cordite has settled with the dust, there's an ambiguity in place of the usual neat closer. As crime pictures go, this ranks high.

NATHAN GILMORE: THREE FILM REVIEWS

“Twenty-four Eyes” (1954), dir. Keisuke Kinoshita

Suffer the children. Made a scant nine years after the end of World War Two, Keisuke Kenoshita’s “Twenty-four Eyes” must have come as a balm to the war-weary Japanese. Resolutely bucolic, the story follows the lives of a dozen young students and their devoted teacher as they navigate the changing world of Japan in the 1940s.

A gritty war drama this is not. In the vein, equally, of Charles Dickens, “Mr Holland’s Opus” and “Goodbye Mr. Chips”, the perspective of “Twenty-Four Eyes” restricts itself to a single small village, a single small school, and a single small classroom. This is not “Dead Poets Society”. The teacher, Hisako Oichi, is a young woman seemingly too inexperienced and timid to handle a class of rowdy kids. The kids are initially unruly, and their parents have their doubts as to whether this new teacher is up to the task. The kids are no charming rascals, either. Their pranks are dangerous, even cruel, and one of them injures Ms Oichi. In her absence, the students realize what she has come to mean to them.

This is not a plot-driven narrative. The only narrative impetus is the actual passage of time. As time passes, the kids grow up and become parents, apprentices, waitresses. There is a scene of exquisite bittersweetness when a promising pupil settles for a restaurant job, and Ms Oichi has a heartbreaking conversation about practicality and wasted potential. All this is done in the understated Japanese way, with delicate considerations of respect and honor for one’s teachers balanced against family pressures and self-deprecation.

Yes, “Twenty-four Eyes” is a tearjerker, and we more cynically-minded viewers may find ourselves wishing for a little less sentiment. But, given a little suspension of cynicism, it turns out to be a sweet, good-natured and affecting little film. I’ve had several teachers like Ms. Oichi, wonderful people of self-sacrifice and relentless service. I hope they watch “Twenty-Four Eyes” sometime, and see themselves in it.

***

“Nicholas and Alexandra”, dir. Franklin J. Schaffner (1971).

Let me address my biases first. I have had a mild obsession with the Romanovs since grade school when I remember reading the news that the remains of Nicholas, his wife and three of his daughters had been identified and exhumed. It was a kids’ magazine, I remember, and I read the piece over and over.

I discovered Robert K. Massie’s classic account in college, quickly dubbed him one of my favorite authors of all time, met him twice, and own a personally-inscribed copy of every book he’s ever written. Suffice to say, the story of the Romanovs is near to my heart.

College is also where I first saw Franklin J. Schaffner’s epic film adaptation of Massie’s book of the same title. “Nicholas and Alexandra” hews quite closely to the book, and that does it credit. Massie is not a novelist or a revisionist, and his history claims to stick closely to the facts. Thus, we assume, so does the movie.

It is a grand epic of the “Lawrence of Arabia” type, with the lavish sets and gorgeous costumes and large scope. But at the center of it are the titular couple. Nicholas and Alexandra are two feeble, flawed people, almost unfairly thrust by fate into a position that tragically overmatches them. An early, typical scene, finds them cooing sweet nothings at each other and then chiding each other because that won’t do to keep up appearances. This is quite true to the historical record: their marriage was a political arrangement, but there seems to have been a foundation of genuine affection undergirding it. And as would prove to have disastrous consequences later, Nicholas struggled to say no to his wife.

Most of us are familiar with the story. The tsarevich is stricken with the disease of hemophilia, for which there is no cure and which was hardly understood in that day. Enter the wandering starets Rasputin, who offers Alexandra the one thing she wants most in the world: to save her baby’s life. Did Rasputin have designs on the imperial throne? The movie doesn’t make that explicit, but it does portray Rasputin as a carousing womanizer— which of course throws even more shadows on his relationships with the tsarina. Tom Baker gives one of his more memorable performances here, half holy man, half harlequin, lecher and lecturer.

Baker nearly upstages the prim Janet Suzman, but his piercing stare and electric blue eyes make us understand how the tsarina might have been taken in. Deeply lonely, both besotted with and imperious toward her husband, the tsarina is an outsider trying desperately to be accepted by the people she is expected to rule.

Michael Jayston as Nicholas is a great performance of his own. Kind, intelligent, but trusting to a fault, Nicholas is a man who wants to be a king in a time when kings were falling out of fashion. He treats the people of Russia like wayward children, acting the part of an indulgent father when they see him as a bloody tyrant. It is this Learian blindness that gives Jayston’s Nicholas his tragic flaw and the drama is as poignant as any in Shakespeare. The emotional climax of the movie for me is the scene when Nicholas stumbles into the bedroom and begs his wife’s forgiveness. For what? His sins were not against her— but he cannot see past the cloister of his family.

Historical revisionism has been kinder to Nicholas, but the consensus is that he was a well-intentioned yet weaker leader who proved unequal to the challenges he faced. The older view espoused in this movie may be out of date, but, boy, it makes for some heartbreaking drama. As does the fate of the rest of the Romanovs. “Nicholas and Alexandra” ends with the tragedy of the murder of the royal family; it does not delve into the Anastasia affair. But it is all the more effective for that. Schaffner smartly doesn’t let the pageantry spill over into the execution. A too-loud clock ticks. We wait, as the family waits. They arrange themselves on chairs, anxious to leave. The door bursts open and a dynasty dies.

It’s a sad and beautiful story, about blindness and pride and ignorance, about the death of a family, weak and flawed, who found themselves thrust into world events that took their lives. And it’s a great, if flawed movie, that does justice to the history. One of my favorites of all time.

***

“The Terrorist” (1998), dir Santosh Sivan.

There is a lot of water in “The Terrorist”. It is constantly raining, and characters spend a lot of time in the spray of a nearby waterfall. It takes place, though this fact is largely left unspoken, on the island nation of Sri Lanka, and there are unsettling shots of an angry, roaring sea. Water is always running down the face of the main character, a young girl named Malli (Ayesha Dharker). Malli is a young girl in her teens. She is a lovely, lively girl who laughs with her friends, carefully applying kohl to her enormous dark eyes.

And Malli is a terrorist. We are never explicitly told, but those who know the history know that the character of Malli is based on the suicide bomber who assassinated Rajiv Gandhi in 1991. She is a Tamil Tiger. Perhaps we are never told the political background of the story because the movie is completely unconcerned with the politics involved. It is simply an observation: how does a young girl, full of life and intelligence, prepare to annihilate herself in the service of a cause? In “The Terrorist”, that question is not rhetorical: “Look. You will see exactly how she does it.” When Malli is selected for the suicide mission, her peers crowd around her as if she’d been invited on a date with the cute boy from school. She is entitled to an honorary dinner with the leader of her movement. It is not a grand ceremony, nor a depressing crust of bread in a military cell. It is a meal of curry and pittu, eaten in a circle with the fingers off a common platter. Like a thousand meals I’ve had in my own home.

Seeing that, tears spurted from my eyes.

Malli, however, is stoic. She has a mission, and no amount of honors or accolades will distract her from it. She leaves for a farm owned by a local man, who may or may not suspect her of being a suicide bomber. The man is a jolly raconteur, somewhat of a philosopher— does he suspect what she is about to do? He is didactic to her, but is that his personality, or is he guiding her towards “a good death”? Would he try to stop her if he knew?

The question, loaded like a rifle, is whether any ideology is worth self-annihilation. Roger Ebert thought not, and said so strongly in his review. I felt a little more conflicted. The answer was painfully not so simple to me. Because, like every movie that in any way touches on the island of Sri Lanka and that beautiful country’s pain-ridden history, it pokes and prods at a painful place in me. Do I think young women should blow themselves up? No, I do not. Do I look in their eyes— in Malli’s huge, liquid eyes— and understand for a little, little moment why they would? Do I see myself? Yes. And tears run down my own face.

SAM STEPHENS: THE SIGN OF THE RAM (1948) REVIEW

The Sign of the Ram (1948) dir. John Sturges

This is the first review here for a movie I consider so-bad-it’s-good. Although a fan of watching bad films, that trend over-saturated movie culture by the 2010s—and frankly, I gleefully participated. But what began with hilarity started to feel cheap, gratuitous, and demeaning. You can only titter and guffaw so much. Not that we should be straight-faced about all cinema, but I retreated to a saner diet. On this April Fool’s Day of 2025 I’m allowing myself the space for this review.

Which brings me to directing icon John Sturges’s The Sign of the Ram.

The movie is a Rebecca lookalike, a fact which I doubt it was ashamed of and which it does not try to hide. It’s a gothic house noir thriller set on a cliffside over the ocean, and it means us to believe it’s got thrills to square up with Hitchcock. In movie like this you accept many things going in: it’s never going to be Rebecca; it’s going to be a little soapy; it’s going to be more mood than thrills. All those are acceptable to a degree. What you hope for is a truly striking gothic mood washing over you like a chilled fog; you want, if not sharply-written, at least ominously-charged dialogue and scenarios.

The plot of The Sign of the Ram revolves around Leah, played by Susan Peters, a beautiful wheelchair-bound poetess who publishes under a pen name in the local papers. I wish that fact were more relevant, but it’s at least a bit of characterization. Leah and her husband live in the big gothic house with her husband and his family and their significant others. Among them is Christine, Leah’s step-daughter. All the characters are young and impossibly good looking and charming in that guile-less 1940s way that never quite passes the snicker test.

Anyways, you’d think there’d be earth-shattering family secrets, and there certainly are secrets—but they never reach the Rebecca-level of dread and foreboding. The plot is filled with cute useless twists and the most basic of lies which could be discussed over dinner—somebody lied about going down to the seashore—but in The Sign of the Ram mild events are absolutely cosmic.

Leah is revealed to be the manipulating force in the household. One household member leaves, causing Leah to be jealous. She flirts with her doctor looks askance on everyone else’s relationships. People pretends to like her, but bit-by-bit we see side-eye given, and then…malicious smirks.

Personal motives are all over the place and never clearly defined. But the main thing is that Leah seems to have an emotional hold over absolutely everyone in the house. The plot whirls into a hilarious parade of people who can’t get married, can’t go to the ball, all because Leah (who puts on a good show and then smirks evilly into the camera) has jealousy issues and literary ambitions—until…they can’t stand it anymore and move out of the house!

And then the big showdown in front of the whole family. Christine, the step-daughter, can also no longer stand being there and wants to (quoting more or less verbatim) move to boarding school and not live in the big house anymore. The emotional waves crash mightily in the musical score as Leah’s willpower is finally and indubitably broken.

Everyone can finally move out of the big house and get married and go to balls and go to live at the boarding school and not live in the big house anymore.

That’s the entirety of the movie’s consequence. Such is the moral weight with which we must now live.

The film was a bomb at the box office. New York Times critic Bosley Crowther wrote that it, “If it weren't for the noisy interjection of thunder-drums and pounding surf from time to time, this would be an effective soporofic. And it might have been kinder to let it be.”

It’s not a flashy enough film to warrant the level of adoration received by The Room, but like that masterpiece it approaches its subject with sincere ambition. Camp films are just that: camp. But movies like The Sign of the Ram and The Room are attempts in genres we take seriously, and their failure, when not merely dull, can refresh our appreciation for the good stuff and, along the way, we can have a good-natured laugh at the bad stuff which somehow is also worthwhile. Watched on the Criterion Channel.