What She Said

Paul McGuigan’s Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool looks at the real life romantic and sexual relationship between Hollywood noir queen and femme fatale Gloria Grahame and Peter Turner an aspiring Liverpool actor 28 years her junior. They met in his parent’s Liverpool boarding house in 1975 with a flirtation that morphed into a fiery sexual affair and they fell in love…. View Post

Diane Kruger won Best Actress at Berlin for her work in Fatih Akin’s thriller In the Fade set in contemporary and über rainy Hamburg.  Katya, a native German and her Kurdish-German husband are trying to live a normal life following his drugs conviction and jail term. They’re doing well and have a young son but one morning she’s off to the spa… View Post

Austrian auteur Michael Haneke’s Happy End may or may not be a sequel to his arresting masterpiece Amour, and the earlier Cache, but it is the latest example of Haneke’s supreme talents as a filmmaker. It appears to be a continuation, at the very least, of the Laurent family stories, heavy on psychological elements and tough truths, revealed and “hidden” in a… View Post

Austrian auteur Michael Haneke’s films are singularly unsettling and voyeuristic; they are uncomfortable, icy and compelling. His 2009 stunner The White Ribbon predicted the Nazi rise to power in Germany via the perpetrators’ childhood cultural traumas.  The children went on to kill millions in the Holocaust.  Haneke leaves enough space for us to lock in on a psychological level and… View Post

Daniel Day-Lewis says he’s made his last film. By my count that’s three times since 2003 that he`s said as much, so I pay zero attention because he’s back in frequent collaborator Paul Thomas Anderson’s masterful Phantom Thread.  If it is his last gig, what a way to go. The film follows a difficult and claustrophobic affair between a famous British women’s… View Post