On a cold and snowy night, medical courier Bryan (Austin Abrams)—who seems more like a Deliveroo driver than someone delivering your granddad’s vital organs, but no matter—is offered double pay to transport a critical item to the Umbrella Corp tower in Raccoon City. As gamers well know, this is hardly a destination to rival a Jet2 holiday.

Lying to the doctor who assigns him the task, Bryan claims to have the snow chains and four-wheel drive necessary to navigate the snow-clogged, shrouded roads. He soon hits a rough patch, however, when a petrified woman runs out in front of his car. Although a police officer (Johnno Wilson) arrives to assist, it is clearly going to be a long night for Bryan. He is already starting to regret putting off the grown-up questions posed by his girlfriend, Michelle (Sara Paxton), as countless new horrors try to make him one with them.

This is far and away the best Resident Evil film to date, which isn’t saying much. Director Zach Cregger brings a Hitchcockian sense of tension mixed with dark comedy. The problem is that there isn’t much of a story. It is simply one scene after another, with most of the dialogue serving purely functional or comedic purposes and offering minimal character development. While the dark humour mostly works, it also has the unfortunate effect of making the characters seem shallow and foolish—especially towards the end in the Umbrella tower, where the scientists come across as slapstick figures, reminiscent of The Three Stooges meets The Thing.

Individual scenes are fantastic, and the opening is superb. Cregger clearly plays with video game point-of-view mechanics and mines plenty of humour from the everyman trope, using the protagonist as a stand-in for the gamer. All in all, Resident Evil (2026) is good, well-crafted fun; it simply lacks depth beneath the surface.

Summarising the plot above was somewhat tricky because the film is essentially a sequence of set-pieces. This linear,”straight ahead” approach feels odd for Cregger, whose previous films, Barbarian (2022) and Weapons (2025), benefited from narratives that constantly doubled back on themselves, shifting perspectives and unfolding non-linearly to reveal the story bit by bit. In that regard, his freshman and sophomore works resemble horror variations on early Quentin Tarantino, whose use of pulp crime tropes in Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994) was elevated by clever structural tricks. Played straight, those films would have been far less interesting without the shifting points of view. The style was, in a way, the substance.

Cregger goes full pulp horror here—the exact opposite of what made his name in the genre. In Barbarian and Weapons, the true antagonist was masked by the structure, akin to a detective story. Their titles gave nothing away; I went into Barbarian knowing only that a woman gets into trouble at an Airbnb, and into Weapons knowing only that a classroom of children disappears.

Of course, anyone buying a ticket for Resident Evil knows what to expect to some degree, even without playing the games. For me, Resident Evil remains a series of films by schlock-auteur Paul W.S Anderson (among other directors) starring Milla Jovovich. The 2002 original offers only one truly memorable sequence: a laser corridor that characters must navigate, facing gruesome dismemberment if sliced. What makes it stick in the mind is that it concludes with the lasers forming an inescapable grid, rendering the prior obstacles pointless since no one could ever reach the end—as if the corridor itself were sentient and liked playing with its captives. (It isn’t, by the way; it’s just lazy writing.)

Naturally, long before the trailers for Cregger’s film landed, it was obvious that whatever this turned out to be, it would easily surpass the seven films before it. The 2002 entry is, at best, a bland retread of Cube (1997)—the genuinely intriguing Canadian sci-fi horror about people trapped in a deadly puzzle box. Cregger avoids staying in a single location until the third act (though the entire film feels like an extended first act), when the narrative adopts a “climb the tower” structure reminiscent of The Raid (2011) or Dredd (2012). Essentially, the entire plot—the explanation for why and how these events are happening—is reduced to a five-minute monologue delivered in a car by a scientist played by Paul Walter Hauser. This rather undermines the premise, openly acknowledging its absurdity. I watched the film with a fan of the games who was left nonplussed by its lack of narrative and comedic tone, and I can see their point. Cregger and co-writer Shay Hatten’s script is an entirely artificial construction.

Several logical flaws jump out. Firstly, why is Bryan entrusted with delivering the item? Given its importance and the corporate and governmental skullduggery surrounding Umbrella’s operations, handing it to an ordinary courier who cannot even confirm whether his car can reach Raccoon City is absurd. Secondly, why is the item sourced from outside Raccoon City in the first place? And if it had to be, why not send the National Guard (mentioned by Hauser’s scientist) to transport it? Thirdly, why are Bryan and those outside Raccoon City completely oblivious to the chaos within? The story is set in the present day: people have smartphones, and the film shows an attempted evacuation. Did no one call or message family outside the city? We live in an era where police violence in Minnesota leads to UK Morris dancers altering their traditional costumes, and everyone holds an opinion on global news stories. Someone would surely be broadcasting a Snapchat of a mutant zombie chasing their people carrier. It recalls an issue with Children of the Corn (1984), where children run a town for months after slaughtering the adults. Did none of those adults have jobs, family,or friends outside the town boundaries?

The point of Resident Evil, of course, is that Bryan serves as an audience surrogate—a stand-in for a video game player. He needs to come from outside the city and remain an ordinary guy because that is what gamers are: outsiders entering a new world. Given how rich and expansive the lore of the games can be, however, simplifying the narrative this drastically feels like a missed opportunity.

Still, the pacing and creature effects are a treat. The imagery is impressive throughout, from corpses coalescing into a single entity to the hulking figure in the sewers (even if, logically speaking, his presence makes little sense). Resident Evil is good, wholesome fun. Well, perhaps not wholesome—but pleasingly gooey, fast, and slick.

GERMANY • USA • CZECH REPUBLIC • CANADA • AUSTRALIA • NEW ZEALAND • FRANCE | 2026 | 95 MINUTES | 2.39:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Cast & Crew

director: Zach Cregger.
writers: Zach Cregger & Shay Hatten (based on the ‘Resident Evil’ video games by Capcom).
starring: Austin Abrams, Zach Cherry, Kali Reis & Paul Walter Hauser.

The post RESIDENT EVIL (2026) appeared first on Frame Rated.

Where have all the good provocateurs gone, and where are all the flawed? During Gregg Araki’s 12-year hiatus from film, spent as a working director in streamer television, sex hasn’t exactly disappeared from the screen. Take a shot every time you see impossibly gorgeous partners tossing each other against the wall like embattled wolverines, and you’ll start enjoying Netflix movies a lot more. Explorations of sex in arthouse cinema haven’t gone extinct either, as witnessed recently in films like Sound of Falling (2025) and The Chronology of Water (2025). What has been eluding us as an audience is a full dive into the horizontal rumba; something unafraid to be playful, weird, funny, messy, toxic, prodding, and naked in every sense of the word.

For us eager Arakiheads, his latest effort promises this and more. Who better to start a Gen X/Zillennial heart-to-heart on sex than a filmmaker who emerged from an era of AIDS and hyperconservatism to deliver unapologetically kinky, satirical, transgressive gems? Araki gave young, queer, alienated, and adrift Xers a voice in indie darlings like The Living End (1992), Totally F*ed Up (1993), The Doom Generation (1995), and Nowhere (1997): all laced with his auteur sense of humour, mischief, and curiosity. He also gave us perhaps the most challenging work on sexuality of all time in Mysterious Skin (2004), sensitive to its jagged, abusive, and damaging edges just as much as its emotional, psychological, and philosophical pastimes.

I Want Your Sex is less a shaking fist from an elder libertine than an amusing, vulnerable look at fucking and all its hang-ups—both modern and ancient. There is certainly a nudge going on, sometimes loving and sometimes mocking, for Zillennials to stop worrying and embrace the horny. The film is much more about navigating its complexities, though: those confusing lines between lust and love, fantasy and reality, what gets you hot, and what gets you exploited. It sees Araki not quite at the level of restraint we last saw him at in 2014’s Lifetime-subverted teen drama White Bird in a Blizzard (2014), but still relatively tame given the subject matter. Are these the subtle eccentricities of a matured director, or muzzled concessions to what he could get done in 2026? Each fan must decide for themselves.

Cooper Hoffman adds another impressive performance to his résumé as frazzled 23-year-old Elliot Bell, introduced with an immediately cheeky surprise: seemingly orgasmic exclamations over a blue-on-pink title card, revealed to be Elliot discovering his smashmate boss Erika Tracy (Olivia Wilde) dead in a pool. Araki’s passion for utilising and playing with neo-noir frames Elliot’s half-reversed Sunset Boulevard situation in a cosy rehashing of the story to detectives. Of course, those detectives are Margaret Cho and Johnny Knoxville, presumably here to defend 1990s sensibilities. Except they don’t, really. Elliot, to this viewer’s pleasant shock, does most of the sex-positive (and negative) talking for himself.

Flashing back 9½ weeks (ahem) to the start of their doomed affair, we follow Elliot into the posh, poppy, and insufferable LA art world with his lowly gig at Erika’s studio. Hoffman wastes no time in drawing us to our protagonist’s sweet and klutzy disposition, trapped in a loveless relationship of formalities with his stereotyped, frigid grad-student girlfriend Minerva (Charli XCX, more on her later) and confessing his desire for spice most adorably to his roomie/bestie/MVP of the movie, Apple (Chase Sui Wonders, more on her later). However, the moment he steps into the office of throwback cynical jester, openly phony artist, and self-proclaimed “pretentious whore from hell” Erika, this becomes Olivia Wilde’s show for a great deal of the runtime.

Wilde contrasts the neurotic sexual energy of The Invite (2026) with a cool, collected, mean, and hilarious performance here. She slides effortlessly into the comfortable nihilism of past Araki antiheroines, magnetic in Erika’s initial proposal to Elliot for hanky-panky—what can and should be discussed equally as a derangement of patriarchal power dynamics, breach of workplace professionalism, consensual agreement between adults, and eventual acidic situationship. How much you’re wooed by her cigarette-smoke-filled diatribe against youngsters labelling, compartmentalising, and fearing everything, as well as her Brown Bunny premiere and therapy-at-the-age-of-six jokes, might be the biggest generational test of I Want Your Sex.

The BDSM play Erika and Elliot engage in provides compassion for, but not much depth on, the subculture. Wilde and Hoffman are a striking dom/sub twosome, injecting plenty of natural humour into their flesh and leather sessions without ever being condescending. Don’t go in expecting it to be the focus, though, as ground rules, boundaries, and partner respect are routinely glossed over or outright dismissed. Moments like Elliot being reluctantly introduced to pegging with a hot-pink dildo are giggle-inducing, yet a little troublesome. As in fellow kink think pieces Pillion (2025) and Truly Naked (2026), the lines between healthy and unhealthy submission aren’t clearly defined.

Araki prefers to have his lead characters unfold ambiguously before us instead, their mistakes only getting more absurd, elaborate, and human. Elliot and Erika go from casual to personal, never exactly romantic, but absolutely intimate with one another’s psychology by the movie’s end. Hoffman and Wilde each switch gears marvellously in the final act; two broken souls battling and pleading for validation in a sobriety that almost takes us to a masterful conclusion. A silly twist and a wedding fantasy-nightmare later—both of which I guiltily enjoyed—and I Want Your Sex loses this vibe entirely. It’s back to being a sex dramedy, which it mostly succeeds at.

In this department, Chase Sui Wonders simply rocks, playing Elliot’s aforementioned wingwoman Apple with a Zillennial humour that contrasts Erika’s and updates Araki’s. Apple’s dual interest and disinterest in sex—wanting to get off, but finding intercourse with men to be like “sliding a tampon in over and over again”, and female hunka chunka enticing yet unattainable—is handled with empathy, recognition, and lightness. The writing never demeans her feelings, concerns, or inexperience, but does allow Wonders to be refreshingly clumsy and real with them. Apple and Elliot’s impromptu threesome invite from Erika is by far the funniest (and most tender) scene in the film, moving from Apple’s sexual awakening in progress to a whiny interruption by Elliot and the wearing of a strap-on like medieval armour in the same six minutes without being the least bit artificial or disorienting.

Those two things are sadly reserved for Minerva, whose stiffly penned and performed presence adds nothing to the story save for an overt jab at younger generations. Charli XCX seems as half-interested in her as Araki and co., not even lending Minny a proper caricature like his resident satirical squares of old. She’s into college and her career, slowly detaching from Elliot, and might even be entertaining an asexual life—all live-and-let-live, normal things. No scapegoating required for a narrative that functions just fine with Elliot and Erika’s conflict. Meanwhile, Mason Gooding is effective yet criminally neglected as Elliot’s gay, uninhibited, barb-tossing, vintage-Araki workmate Zap. Can we get him and Apple in the same room, please?

The script, co-written by Gregg and Slutever founder/host/columnist Karley Sciortino, is strong in its unfiltered approach to and simultaneous understanding of Elliot and Erika. Some bias does swing towards Erika’s aggressive philosophy, though, with a final-draft gender reversal perhaps the only thing saving this from being another domineering hunk flick: attractive for some, and gag-worthy for others. Shaming no one for their individual tastes and opinions, to be clear—Sciortino included. Can we agree that there are already too many of these movies, though? More boy-toy “dom-coms” are and would continue to be a nice change of perspective.

Overall, I Want Your Sex is perhaps not the definitive discussion on sex in the 2020s, or the iconoclastic blast of satire from Araki his loyal followers have been waiting for. What it actually is still works, however: lively, mildly perverted,and ultimately bittersweet in its assessment of how we use and care for each other. Sometimes in the same demented space.

Bonus points for random fantasy animation, some wild POVs, and a James Duval cameo at the very end—all sure to please Our Cult of Araki. And for Wilde’s un-CGIed melt-face in the end-credit bloopers, which does the impossible in rivaling The Invite’s bad-tequila face.

USA | 2026 | 90 MINUTES | 1.85:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Cast & Crew

director: Gregg Araki.
writers: Karley Sciortino & Gregg Araki.
starring: Olivia Wilde, Cooper Hoffman, Chase Sui Wonders, Mason Gooding & Charli XCX.

The post I WANT YOUR SEX (2026) appeared first on Frame Rated.

There’s no denying that The Day the Earth Stood Still is a genre-changing classic that remains just as relevant today as it did three-quarters of a century ago. Maybe more so. A major part of its appeal is the nostalgia of its sleek retro-futurism and genuinely iconic golden-age imagery colliding with 1950s film noir, but it’s the carefully considered allegorical flexibility that has ensured its longevity.

The project began as a concept even before a script was commissioned. Producer Julian Blaustein had noted that so-called pulp magazines were publishing remarkably imaginative and intelligent stories that employed allegory and metaphor to challenge accepted norms and envisage brave futures. He believed the time was right for cinema to embrace the trend and use the apolitical arena of science fiction to address the fear and paranoia he saw proliferating in society, stoked by certain individuals and organisations for political leverage. Sadly, this remains a familiar malaise today. To mitigate such division and counter the weaponisation of hate, he also wanted to encourage the potential peace-keeping role of the newly formed United Nations, which he perceived as crucial in preventing nuclear war.

With the approval of Darryl F. Zanuck, Head of 20th Century Fox, he pursued this idea by reading hundreds of stories until settling on “Farewell to the Master” by Harry Bates, first published in Astounding Science Fiction magazine in 1940, and tasking Edmund H. North with adapting the short story. Blaustein offered Robert Wise the directorial helm because of his sense of realism and track record of making compelling films that didn’t shy away from serious themes. It would be the first of Wise’s rare, though always impressive, forays into science fiction.

Bernard Herrmann’s experimental score pioneered the use of electronic instruments, including two theremins and three organs, plus a brass section and an unusual array of percussion and studio effects. It sets the otherworldly tone during the opening credits to contrast with the documentary-style montage that follows. Snippets of various countries and cultures around the world show people reacting to news that an extraterrestrial object has entered Earth’s orbit.

It’s an American film so, naturally, of all the places in the world, what turns out to be a spaceship lands on a baseball diamond in Washington DC. Predictably, the military responds in force, surrounding the large flying saucer. It isn’t until the 10-minute mark that the ship opens and we meet our protagonist, Klaatu (Michael Rennie), wearing a suit and helmet that emphasise his otherness. He raises an open hand and offers a friendly greeting in English before slowly descending the ramp from his ship. Then he reaches inside his tunic and produces a device which he proceeds to raise towards the battery of tanks and heavy artillery.

For an interplanetary emissary, this seems a naive thing to do, but it underscores the fact that where this spaceman comes from, the concept of guns and how they’re used is alien to him. Perhaps that’s why he remains so calm in the face of the military threat. Nevertheless, a nervous, trigger-happy soldier takes this for a weapon and shoots him.

While the soldiers are distracted, another figure exits the saucer. This is Gort (Lock Martin), an eight-foot-tall silver ‘cyberman’ equipped with a ray that can precisely disassemble specific materials, as demonstrated when it disintegrates several rifles, a tank, and a cannon without harming the soldiers carrying or operating them. Klaatu, although injured, manages to order Gort to stand down before explaining that the scientific device he offered was intended as a gift.

So far, the opening gambit has followed the original story, but here the film diverges. In the source material Klaatu is fatally wounded, whereas here he’s whisked away to hospital. In both the story and the movie, there’s an inference that Gort and Klaatu may have been given synthetic humanoid forms to interact with humans. This might explain why Klaatu doesn’t remove his helmet on arrival, as he has yet to assimilate to Earth’s atmosphere. This is questioned later when medics discuss Klaatu’s X-rays and superhuman healing, commenting that his biological age is far younger than the 78 years he claims. This implies a range of explanations, including that his current body is indeed a fabricated one, touching upon the sort of serious ethical discussions that are only now surfacing in today’s scientific community.

While recovering, Klaatu is visited by Presidential Secretary Harley (Frank Conroy), who wants to know the purpose of this first contact. Klaatu refuses to discuss this with him or the president alone, requesting an audience with representatives from all the nations of the world. This immediately exposes the flaw in our global society: its ideological fragmentation and continuing international conflict. Klaatu realises that political channels will be useless to his mission, so he escapes from hospital to conduct his own research into human nature, hoping to find a way to gather people to hear his warning that the world must unite in peace or face obliteration.

Claude Rains and Spencer Tracy were both offered the lead, but were unable to fit the planned production into their schedules. Zanuck recommended Michael Rennie because, despite being a seasoned actor with around 30 screen credits, he wasn’t well known to US audiences. Wise agreed that this, along with Rennie’s dignified demeanour and slender six-foot-four frame, made him ideal as the stranger from another world; a more famous Hollywood star would have immediately disrupted that initial sense of mystery.

Michael Rennie’s Klaatu is non-violent, calm and composed, with a presence that often echoes the stillness of Gort. In the face of militaristic aggression, he doesn’t retaliate, even when that means taking a bullet—which he does more than once. He seems to be a prototype for The Doctor in Doctor Who: an alien who remains patient with the childish petulance of humans. Oh, and he can regenerate, too. Plus, the flight deck of the saucer looks a little like a TARDIS control room.

Modernist maverick architect Frank Lloyd Wright collaborated with the production team behind the scenes, working with set designers Thomas Little and Claude Carpenter on the saucer design. Wright suggested that the surface should be smooth and featureless, like a living metal that could heal itself. This effect was achieved using soft putty and wax to seal any joints and render them invisible. The film was then reversed as the ramps retracted and doors closed. This envisaged smart materials, which we are only now beginning to develop and apply practically.

It seems the interior of the vessel was inspired by Wright’s Johnson Wax Headquarters building, completed in 1936. There appears to be a clear aesthetic connection with its clean minimalism, translucence, recurring circular motifs, and curvilinear fixtures and furniture. Wright’s buildings are large-windowed and well-lit. Likewise, the interior of Klaatu’s craft is bright and white, almost shadowless when activated. This provides a meaningful contrast with the noirish treatment of other interiors, where deep shadows act as metaphors for the darker corners of our psyche where fear and paranoia breed.

The simple aesthetics of the flying saucer itself were hugely influential on a cultural scale beyond cinema. Sightings of UFOs had been on the increase since the end of the World War II, but they took a variety of forms, such as crescents and lozenges. The following year, 1952, became the peak for UFO sightings, which were overwhelmingly saucer-shaped—many resembling hubcaps or, indeed, Klaatu’s smooth-surfaced metallic ship. Thus, the mass consciousness of mid-20th-century USA attests to the design’s iconic status.

Gort the robot is sleek and seamless, as if he’s an extension of the ship itself, and their wireless connectivity envisages what we now know as Wi-Fi. It’s awesome in the truest sense that this unit, consisting of a robot and a flying saucer, contains the power to destroy the Earth. With the recent demonstrations of atomic power in the form of bombs, and with the first nuclear power station coming online in 1951, this would have been frighteningly believable. Gort embodies the dual nature of new technology capable of wreaking annihilation, but which can be controlled by clear moral imperatives. At the time, the film would have been an explicit warning against nuclear escalation and the dangers of radiation.

Although such terminology wouldn’t enter common parlance until the late-1950s, today’s audiences will more readily understand the core theme as a contemplation of agentic artificial intelligence. Klaatu explains that he comes from a collective of interplanetary civilisations that have eradicated aggression and live in harmony. This was achieved through relinquishing some freedoms and creating a robot police force, represented by Gort. These peacekeepers patrol the planets, and if aggression is detected and appears to be escalating towards conflict, a robot will visit. Usually their presence is enough of a catalyst to restore peace immediately. The alternative is total annihilation. Their judgment is dispassionate, logical, and non-negotiable.

Klaatu takes the name of Carpenter from the dry-cleaning ticket attached to the suit he stole from the hospital. This, along with his resurrection and final ascension, presents him as a Christ-like saviour figure, extending the movie’s metaphorical reach into religious territory. Just like Jesus, he decides the way to understand—and hopefully save—humankind is to live among them. So he takes a room in an unremarkable boarding house, where little Bobby Benson (Billy Gray) assumes he’s a government agent on the trail of the escaped spaceman. They strike up a friendship and, as Mr Carpenter, Klaatu becomes a father figure, accompanying him on a tour of the city while his mother, Helen (Patricia Neal), spends time with her fiancé, Tom (Hugh Marlowe).

Anne Baxter was initially cast in the female lead, but last-minute rescheduling meant she was no longer available. Wise knew the theatrically trained Patricia Neal, having directed her the previous year in the mystery melodrama Three Secrets (1950). Apparently, she was convinced to take the role at short notice because the script seemed simple and undemanding. However, she’s perfect as a believable 1950s single mother, unashamed of her intelligence while navigating independence in a society that places great value on the idealised nuclear family. She’s prepared to shun the easy option of marriage to a man whose ethics are decidedly shaky, becoming one of the few to fully grasp Klaatu’s predicament.

It’s Bobby who indirectly suggests that Klaatu contact local genius Professor Barnhardt (Sam Jaffe). Understanding that the world’s scientific community collaborates across borders, Klaatu requests that a broad group of international representatives be summoned to hear his ultimatum at the same time and place. The professor explains that it’s possible, but with so little time, an irrefutable, non-lethal demonstration of Gort’s power would be needed to convince them. Hence, all electricity is disrupted and the world is brought to a standstill—except for essential services such as hospitals and aeroplanes in flight.

Robert Wise made the decision to avoid superfluous explanations regarding the technology while ensuring its plausibility. Astrophysicist Samuel Herrick was the science consultant who advised on what to leave in and what to take out of the dialogue. He was exploring the mathematics of the three-body problem at the time, and the equations written on Professor Barnhardt’s blackboard were based on his own work relevant to this challenge.

The Day the Earth Stood Still is the progenitor of the benign ambassadorial alien trope, with very few big-screen predecessors. Denmark’s A Trip to Mars / Himmelskibet (1918) may be the earliest and is also cited as the first space opera. The plot involved explorers from Earth reaching Mars to find a utopian paradise populated by pacifist philosophers. Made at the close of World War I, it presents an idealised model for a more harmonious human future: an early use of an alien society as a moral compass and possible catalyst for change.

The Flash Gordon serials (1936–1940) prefigured a complex interplanetary society of politics and diplomacy, made up of both allies and enemies. However, they were dominated by the evil empire of Ming the Merciless, which posed a threat to Earth, and their first contact certainly wasn’t in an ambassadorial capacity.

Superman, of course, is perhaps the most obvious early example of a benign alien in popular culture, and comic adaptations had started to appear as cinematic serials from 1948. Initially, though, the superhero’s extraterrestrial origin story was simply a device to explain his powers—a desperate post-war affirmation that “truth, justice, and the American way” would ultimately win through.

Thus, The Day the Earth Stood Still remains an anomaly in mid-20th-century American cinema—a nation gripped by Cold War paranoia and anti-communist hysteria stoked by Senator Joseph McCarthy and his cronies. Most aliens, therefore, were malicious invaders or insidious infiltrators: metaphors for perceived threats from beyond the borders, particularly from communist nations. Yet the spiritual, philosophical, or messianic alien left a lasting legacy that resonates through the more considered and cerebral cinema of sci-fi.

Based on a story by Ray Bradbury, Jack Arnold’s It Came from Outer Space (1953) was the first to pick up the baton of benign aliens who, in this case, come to Earth accidentally and are in more danger from us than we are from them. This was Universal Pictures turning their hand to serious science fiction with a reasonable mid-range budget that did well enough at the box office, encouraging them to splash out on the lavish special effects extravaganza This Island Earth (1955), in which aliens covertly come to Earth to learn from us. They’re also part of an interplanetary society, though, unlike Klaatu’s collective, haven’t managed to eradicate war. But although their society isn’t entirely benign, each individual has the capacity for good or evil, and their desperate, dystopian society holds a cautionary mirror to our own.

Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) is possibly the best-known and best-loved wholly benign alien, who also befriends a human child, nearly dies, and is miraculously healed. John Carpenter’s Starman (1984) shares some narrative beats, not least an ambassadorial alien falling victim to a trigger-happy US military, followed by a resurrection motif. The events of James Cameron’s The Abyss (1989) occur as tensions escalate between the US and the Soviet Union, and the Cold War seems poised to go hot. Here, the aliens also have technology capable of wiping out civilisation at their disposal, but instead make a moral judgement of leniency. The alien interaction in Robert Zemeckis’s Contact (1997) is more baffling, but is certainly in the same lineage of benign aliens offering philosophical wisdom and transcendence, as do the time-bending aliens of Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival (2016).

Scott Derrickson’s remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008) was an attempt to update the story to appease 21st-century cinemagoers more used to FX-heavy science fiction blockbusters. It has its moments, and the redesign of Gort was inventive while still honouring the original; however, it leaned into the spectacle of destruction more than the human-scale story, veering much closer to standard alien threat and invasion tropes. It was almost the antithesis of the original.

Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still is not an alien invasion movie. Its fusion of allegory, moral inquiry, and sublime yet restrained spectacle set the template for alien diplomacy narratives. What began as a plea for unity in an age of nuclear dread has become a broader meditation on fear, responsibility, and the choices that define us. Seventy‑five years later, Klaatu’s warning still rings true—no longer a relic of Cold War anxiety, but a stark and pertinent reminder that the future we fear can be asserted or averted by our actions today.

USA | 1952 | 92 MINUTES | 1.37:1 | BLACK & WHITE | ENGLISH • FRENCH • HINDI • RUSSIAN

Cast & Crew

director: Robert Wise.
writer: Edmund H. North (based on the story ‘Farewell to the Master’ by Harry Bates).
starring: Michael Rennie, Patricia Neal, Sam Jaffe, Hugh Marlowe, Billy Gray, Frances Bavier & Lock Martin.

The post THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL (1951) appeared first on Frame Rated.

More than 20 years after Serpico (1973), Sidney Lumet remained fascinated by police corruption in New York, his hometown. By the mid-1990s, he had already revisited the topic twice, in Prince of the City (1981) and Q&A (1990). However, while those three films focused primarily on the officers themselves, Lumet took a slightly different tack for Night Falls on Manhattan, making his protagonist a district attorney instead.

This final installment of Lumet’s corruption quartet is relatively sympathetic towards the corrupted—or at least some of them. The central dilemma for Sean Casey (Andy Garcia) is that exposing police malfeasance means letting a thoroughly nasty criminal go free. Casey begins as vehemently anti-corruption as Serpico himself, but he eventually acknowledges that a little rule-bending is unavoidable, even as he laments that “it wasn’t supposed to happen to me”. While this might not be quite what we expect from the fiercely idealistic director behind 12 Angry Men (1957), it is perhaps more realistic.

Night Falls on Manhattan is based—with substantial alterations—on a novel by Robert Daley, who also wrote the source material for Prince of the City. The storyline, however, is rooted in reality: the 1988 trial of drug dealer Larry Davis following a shootout that injured six police officers. Davis claimed self-defence, arguing that the police raid on his sister’s apartment was part of a hit. His argument succeeded, leading to an acquittal (though he ended up in prison on other charges regardless).

The film opens with a montage of young assistant district attorneys starting their first day on the job. It’s unglamorous work, far from the heroic pursuit of justice they might have envisioned. As District Attorney Morgenstern (Ron Leibman) later tells Sean: “What you’re searching for, you’re not going to find.” Soon, however, the film pivots to the thinly disguised Davis case via a raid on a Harlem apartment block, supposedly staged to capture drug lord Washington (Shiek Mahmud-Bey). Washington escapes, but after consulting his lawyer—Vigoda, a high-profile civil-rights advocate played by Richard Dreyfuss in the film’s standout performance—he surrenders to the police and pleads self-defence in court.

Despite his inexperience, Sean is assigned to prosecute Washington. Vigoda mounts an aggressive defence that strongly hints at police corruption, but Sean wins over the jury, securing a conviction. This victory propels Sean into the district attorney’s seat—a highly powerful political role as the city’s chief prosecutor. He immediately sets out to make his mark with an anti-corruption crusade, promising equal treatment under the law.

His lofty goals founder, however, when evidence reveals that police officers—whom Washington had previously bribed—had indeed targeted him for murder. Prosecuting these corrupt officers means Sean must acknowledge that Washington’s self-defence plea, the very one he defeated in court to secure his promotion, was justifiable.

The rest of the film follows Sean as he wrestles with this dilemma and copes with revelations about his father (Ian Holm) and family friend Allegretto (James Gandolfini), both fellow officers. He eventually collaborates with Vigoda to find a solution and begins a relationship with one of Vigoda’s staffers, Peggy (Lena Olin).

Lumet couldn’t decide how to end the movie, even after shooting had begun. He eventually brought in playwright Jon Robin Baitz, who was making his feature-film writing debut, to help resolve the climax. The resulting conclusion brings the narrative full circle: Sean, now in charge, addresses a fresh intake of assistant district attorneys, explicitly stating the themes that have driven the preceding two hours.

While Garcia capably carries the weight of the film, Dreyfuss delivers the finest performance. He plays an intriguing, intelligent, and likeable ex-radical whose natural instinct is to oppose authority, yet who harbours no love for the drug trade after losing his teenage daughter to an overdose. His seniority allows Lumet to position him as a counterweight to Sean. “I never thought I was perfect,” Dreyfuss’s character notes, calling Sean “a romantic”—an ironic inversion of expectations given their relative ages.

The supporting cast also features notable turns from Colm Feore, as a supercilious member of the DA’s team, and Holm as Sean’s father, a man who has already learned the painful necessity of breaking minor rules to preserve major ones.At times, Holm conveys a sense of barely controlled outrage. Leibman is wildly over-the-top in his early scenes as Sean’s predecessor, but it effectively contrasts the two men, even if it’s unclear whether Lumet intended the performance to be humorous. More problematic is Gandolfini, whom Lumet admired. The actor’s child-like quality—and his tendency to appear to smile even whilst crying—suited the boastful, insecure Tony Soprano perfectly, but it doesn’t quite fit here.

Meanwhile, Mark Isham contributes a rich, contemplative, and unobtrusive jazz-influenced score. His work replaced an earlier, likely more assertive, score by Wynton Marsalis. The graphic design of the opening titles, created by Jakob Trollbäck, is exceptionally distinctive.

Shot with assurance by cinematographer David Watkin and edited by Sam O’Steen, Night Falls on Manhattan moves at a brisk pace. The visual storytelling is economical without feeling rushed. It feels authentic without straying into excessive grit, wasting little time on atmospheric filler or side plots; we get only the highlights, exemplified by the spare brevity of the opening statements in Washington’s trial.

It functions as a film noir to an extent, but it treats its moral ambiguities matter-of-factly and ultimately lands on an optimistic note. Sean remains within the legal system, accepting that his initial ideals were naive, yet remaining determined to do good. The message may lack subtlety, but the characters are far more intriguingly complex than those in standard genre fare. Lumet sustains a balanced, non-judgmental interest in them—and their ethical dilemmas—from start to finish.

USA | 1996 | 113 MINUTES | 1.85:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Limited Edition Blu-ray Special Features:

• High Definition (1080p) Blu-ray presentation based on a 2K remaster from the original negative by Arrow Films. Lumet and his cinematographer, David Watkin, employ a subdued palette, heavy on browns and greens, whilst lighting tends towards the dark. With most scenes set indoors, it’s all rather reminiscent visually of The Godfather (1972). The transfer here is extremely clear, however; there’s no muddiness, and the occasional brighter colours come through vividly.
• Original lossless 5.1 surround and 2.0 stereo audio.
• Archive commentary by Sidney Lumet.
• Archive commentary by Andy Garcia and Ron Leibman, with producers Josh Kramer and Thom Mount.
• The Directors: Sidney Lumet, an hour-long archive documentary from 2002 featuring interviews with Lumet, Garcia, Leibman, Jack Lemmon, Rod Steiger, Christopher Walken and others.
• On-set interviews with Lumet, Garcia, Dreyfuss, Olin, Holm and Leibman.
• Behind-the-scenes footage.
• Theatrical trailer and TV spots.
• Optional English subtitles.
• Reversible sleeve featuring newly commissioned artwork by Tom Ralston.
• Collectors’ booklet featuring writing on the film by Nick Clement and original production notes.

Cast & Crew

director: Sidney Lumet.
writer: Sidney Lumet (based on the novel ‘Tainted Evidence’ by Robert Daley).
starring: Andy Garcia, Richard Dreyfuss, Lena Olin, Ian Holm & James Gandolfini.

The post NIGHT FALLS ON MANHATTAN (1996) appeared first on Frame Rated.

Decades after Sally Owens (Sandra Bullock) found what seemed like her happily ever after with the detective investigating her sister Gillian’s (Nicole Kidman) boyfriend’s disappearance, new trouble arrives when the death watch beetle—whose clicking announces a witch’s impending death—is heard in their home.

Their Aunt Jet (Dianne Wiest) is due to pass away on her birthday, leaving behind a book that may finally break the curse cast by a Pilgrim ancestor: that no Owens woman may love a man without him dying tragically. (If ever there were a case for political lesbianism, I suppose this is it.)

Following the death of the last man she loved, Sally charmed her daughters into forgetting their magical heritage so they could lead “normal” lives. Surprise, surprise: since she didn’t charm them to be asexual, young Kylie (Joey King) falls for a fellow student, Gideon (Xolo Maridueña), who is struck into a coma whilst cycling to bring her flowers.

Desperate to resurrect him, she travels to England with Aunt Jet’s book to search for the Owens family’s roots. Sally and Gillian are in hot pursuit, along the way hooking up with a hunky occultist, Ian Wright (Lee Pace). Meanwhile, Aunt Frances (Stockard Channing) and the other daughter, Antonia (Maisie Williams), are handily sidelined by making Antonia a medical student and confining them both to Gideon’s sickroom.

Practical Magic 2 is fairly innocuous IP exploitation. The premise is poorly thought out and makes Bullock’s character look like a dumb ox at best and reckless with her children’s lives at worst. It’s the result of rehashing her arc from the first film, as though she hasn’t learned a thing in 30 years. Looking back, what made the first film a cult classic was an earthiness to its sisterly dynamic that felt real amidst the fantasy.

No such reality intrudes here. I’m not sure why they decided to pack the leads off to England, beyond appealing to audiences who never got over Harry Potter. I did get a laugh from a journey where the train looked straight out of the 1930s—no grotty National Express for these witches.

As you can tell from my summary of the inciting incidents, the film is chock-a-block with plot. Overloaded, in fact, in the way sequels tend to be. Not long ago, I watched Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous (2005)—the follow-up to Bullock’s Miss Congeniality (2000)—on Netflix. It suffers from the same problem as Practical Magic 2: it throws fistfuls of new characters and situations at you while simply repeating the last movie’s beats, making it feel like a badly told version of the original.

The film also does that thing I hate in trashy fantasy: giving the villain a tragic backstory to motivate them, but evincing no compassion or nuance. Not that tragedy justifies evil, but if you’re going to give your baddie a traumatic past, treating them as a one-dimensional antagonist makes the heroes seem mean-spirited.

“No one ever came to save me,” they whine at one point. Well, aren’t they right? All that was needed was to cut the gloating from the heroes’ triumph. If you’re going to have a flat, uncomplicated villain, don’t make them sympathetic. Though this might be more of a “me” issue than anything a general audience would care about.

Fans of the original Practical Magic may know it was hardly critically revered, with many considering it a mawkish jumble of tones. For me, though, it’s a fun medley of tropes and themes—incorporating Gothic horror, romantic comedy, cosy fantasy, and family saga—that fits into a very particular niche of “girls’ night” films dealing with challenging subjects (domestic violence and social isolation) in a cosily simplistic way. Other examples include Dirty Dancing (1987) and Steel Magnolias (1989). Whether or not you like that movie, directed by Griffin Dunne and written by Robin Swicord, Akiva Goldsman, and Adam Brooks, Practical Magic at least felt like it sprang from a genuine need to tell a story, based on Alice Hoffman’s novel of the same name.

Practical Magic 2 is also based on a Hoffman book, her sequel The Book of Magic (the movie’s title feels oddly retro; I wouldn’t have been surprised if, like other reboots, it was just called Practical Magic again). Perhaps the book shares similar problems with the film, directed this time by Susanne Bier and written by Akiva Goldsman, Georgia Pritchett, and Kelly Marcel. The writing-to-directing gender ratio is exactly inverted this time—three women and one man, compared to the original’s three men and one woman. Not that it matters: no amalgamation of human attributes could give this pale retread life.

A sequel to Practical Magic cried out for a lower-key approach—a cosy, small-town tale where the daughters find themselves drawn to the same man. Instead, Bier and Goldsman (the only returning writer) go all Fantastic Beasts with it. Its tedious plotting and shallow atmosphere are very much in line with those post-Harry Potter films, essentially becoming a daytime soap opera with expensive VFX.

It tries to incorporate themes of sisterhood and overcoming trauma, because that’s expected of every woman-centred film now. I love a female empowerment story, but films like this only reach a Spice Girls level of feminism, where meaningful discussions between female characters are replaced with slogans. The film is half-hearted about it anyway: it brings up an Owens ancestor being raped by the lord of the manor before being burned as a witch, and the resulting child having to watch her burn. It’s a lot to digest, yet the thread is discarded almost as soon as it’s introduced.

The acting is fine. Sandra Bullock has made good films, though she seems intent on taking the trashier end of projects offered to her, rarely challenging herself beyond basic heroine roles. Nicole Kidman goes through the motions, as do Dianne Wiest and Stockard Channing. The younger Owens sisters are adequate, and Lee Pace is a serviceable hunk.

USA | 2026 | 130 MINUTES | 2.39:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Cast & Crew

director: Susanne Bier.
writers: Akiva Goldsman, Georgia Pritchett & Kelly Marcel (based on the novel ‘The Book of Magic’ by Alice Hoffman).
starring: Sandra Bullock, Nicole Kidman, Joey King, Lee Pace, Maisie Williams, Xolo Maridueña, Dianne Wiest & Stockard Channing.

The post PRACTICAL MAGIC 2 (2026) appeared first on Frame Rated.

The best Stephen King adaptations are usually the simpler ones—those based on a single strong idea rather than a multi-stranded plot (such as Carrie or Stand By Me, rather than It or The Stand). Misery, directed by Rob Reiner and written by William Goldman, is among the most successful of them all, thanks to the clarity of its central concept: an injured writer is trapped in a remote house with a crazed woman who believes in his fictional characters a bit too much. It could almost be an elevator pitch.

Of course, such a stripped-back plot puts an extra burden on the actors. If we don’t believe in them, the whole thing fails because there are no narrative bells and whistles to distract us. There aren’t many big surprises in Misery, though there are plenty of small ones. This scarcely matters, however, given the power of the central performances by Kathy Bates and James Caan. The latter occupies a less obviously flamboyant role than Bates, but one that contributes every bit as much to Misery‘s success.

Misery opens with Paul Sheldon (Caan) typing away. The camera reveals a bottle of champagne and an empty glass beside him. He handwrites “THE END” on his typescript, pours a drink, and lights a cigarette. It’s clearly an end-of-writing ritual, presented with the extreme economy and clarity that characterises the whole film, with each shot showing a single detail.

We learn from this that Paul is a writer celebrating the completion of a new book. We soon discover he’s been staying at an isolated hotel to finish it, and we see him drive off towards the big city—and into a steadily worsening storm. This is a blatant weather metaphor, but it’s also a crucial plot element on a literal level: it’s this storm that causes yet another of the car accidents that repeatedly crop up in King’s work, after which Paul is rescued from his wrecked vehicle by Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates).

Annie, a former nurse, takes Paul to her isolated home and cares for him. She seems solicitous and efficient enough at first, but Paul soon discovers she’s more than an average Good Samaritan; she’s a massive fan of his Misery Chastain novels, a series of bodice-ripping Victorian romances. She’s his self-proclaimed “number one fan”, so besotted by the character Paul created that she’s even named her pet pig Misery. We hear her speak the famous line, “I’m your number one fan”, before we ever see her face.

She isn’t pleased to discover among Paul’s possessions the manuscript he’s just finished—a much grittier, more foul-mouthed novel set in the modern world. Then something else tips her over the edge: his newly published Misery book arrives at the local store. Annie settles down to read it with eager anticipation, only to discover that Paul kills off her beloved heroine. Hell hath no fury like a number-one fan spurned. With Paul now at her mercy, she decides it’s time for him to start writing what she wants…

Thanks to Bates’s performance, Annie dominates attention whenever she enters the single room—Paul’s bedroom—where much of the film is set. The character’s reputation may be rather over-the-top, but it’s a performance of great subtlety. Annie is clearly severely unbalanced, yet she’s also cunning, and rage coexists alongside a kind of genuine love. Bates cycles through her moods (coquettish, matter-of-fact, irritated, crazed) without letting any become a caricature. The way she gradually elevates Annie from calmness, through ordinary anger, into an unhinged fury is masterful. Subtle shifts in her voice and eyes signal the precise moment reason departs.

Goldman, Reiner, and King deserve substantial credit for the character. Annie’s strangely folksy vocabulary (“you dirty bird”, “oogy”, “cock-a-doodie”) and her pockets of ignorance (“what’s the ceiling that dago painted?”, referring to the Sistine Chapel) lend her a memorable realism. The scene where she absent-mindedly (or perhaps intentionally) sprinkles fuel over Paul’s bedclothes is chilling.

While Bates delivers the performance most viewers remember, Caan provides sterling, understated support in a difficult reactive role that requires him to remain bedridden for most of the film. He’s completely believable as a popular yet frustrated writer who longs to be recognised for serious literature. He’s an unpretentious professional used to dealing with fans, though unprepared for one this intense. As in so much of King’s work, Misery offers plenty of meta-commentary on the nature of writing and the author–reader relationship. Paul’s feigned affability towards Annie is tinged with just the right degree of apprehension. Like Bates, Caan conveys vast emotion through simple facial expressions: his eyes wide with worry when she spills soup, or his subtle gulp when she says, “I love you, Paul.”

Excellent support is provided by Richard Farnsworth as the local sheriff (a far more prominent character in the film than in the novel) and Frances Sternhagen as his wife, whose search for Paul provides a tension-building counterpoint to the ordeal inside Annie’s house. In some films, this sub-plot might diminish the sense of claustrophobia, but Reiner and Goldman achieve the opposite, heightening our empathy with the trapped protagonist. Salvation is tantalisingly close, yet just out of reach.

Their parallel storyline also allows Goldman and Reiner to inject some humour, which might otherwise have felt incongruous within the core Annie–Paul dynamic. (Not that humour is entirely absent there: when Paul taps out “fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck” on the typewriter Annie provides, it’s a clear nod to Jack Nicholson’s unhinged repetitive typing in The Shining.) Lauren Bacall, meanwhile, contributes an enjoyable cameo as Paul’s agent.

For the most part, precise and uncomplicated direction from Reiner (who previously adapted King to great acclaim in 1986’s Stand By Me) and a masterful script from Goldman blend plot and performance into a gripping narrative. Indeed, perhaps the only weak notes in Misery are Mark Shaiman’s score (which becomes somewhat intrusive during peak moments) and a mildly unsatisfying ending. A coda is certainly necessary, yet this one fails to convince us that Paul has been either transformed or permanently damaged by his ordeal.

These are minor flaws, and Misery was rightly praised by critics upon release as a thoroughly enjoyable thriller. As Derek Malcolm wrote in The Guardian, “you’d have to be churlish not to be entertained”. Many singled out Bates’s performance, which earned her the Academy Award for Best Actress alongside several other major honours.

Misery hasn’t dated and remains one of the finest King film adaptations. It serves as an impressive showcase for Caan’s versatility in a role unusual for him (Paul remains a passive victim for much of the runtime). Above all, this is Bates’s film. While the script and direction lay the foundation for her character, it’s the scowling face of Kathy Bates as Annie Wilkes, poised to commit monstrous acts as a “number one fan”, that remains the enduring image of the film.

USA | 1990 | 107 MINUTES | 1.85:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH

4K Ultra HD Blu-ray Special Features:

• 4K (2160p) Ultra HD Blu-ray presentation in Dolby Vision (HDR10-compatible). Vibrant colours, both light and dark, bring to life Barry Sonnenfeld’s cinematography and the work of production designer Norman Garwood—both in the expansive, wintry exteriors and inside Annie Wilkes’s house, where most of the action unfolds and where the contrast between cheerful and sombre tones underlines the contradictions of the character.
• Original lossless stereo and 5.1 surround audio options.
• NEW audio commentary by film critics Teri Gamble & Julia Marchese, co-hosts of the Horror Movie Survival Guide podcast. Most of the special features on this disc have been available before, but this new commentary is well worth a listen—a chatty yet perceptive discussion by two “number-one fans” who are thoroughly knowledgeable about both the novel and the film adaptation.
• Two further audio commentary tracks, with director Rob Reiner and screenwriter William Goldman.
• NEW Misery’s Chord, an interview with composer Marc Shaiman. An insightful look into the process of film composition in general, as well as the creation of the score for this specific production. Misery was only Shaiman’s second feature score, following When Harry Met Sally… for the same director; he has since gone on to compose around 50 more, including several further collaborations with Reiner.
• Interviews with director Rob Reiner and effects artist Greg Nicotero.
• Misery Loves Company (making-of featurette).
• Marc Shaiman’s Musical Misery Tour (featurette).
• Five featurettes on the Annie Wilkes character and stalkers: Diagnosing Annie Wilkes; Profile of a Stalker; Advice for the Stalked; Celebrity Stalkers; and Anti-Stalking Laws.
• Theatrical trailers.
• Image galleries.
• Optional English subtitles.
• Reversible sleeve featuring two original artwork options.
• Collectors’ booklet containing new writing by film scholars Sean Abley, Kat Ellinger, Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and David Moses.

Cast & Crew

director: Rob Reiner.
writer: William Goldman (based on the novel by Stephen King).
starring: James Caan, Kathy Bates, Richard Farnsworth, Frances Sternhagen, Lauren Bacall, Graham Jarvis & J.T Walsh.

The post MISERY (1990) appeared first on Frame Rated.

There is an obvious way to misunderstand Bugsy Malone: to treat its central conceit as the film itself. Children play gangsters, cars are pedal-powered, machine guns fire cream, and nightclubs are populated by junior molls, singers and hoodlums. The premise is so immediately legible that it risks reducing the film to a novelty before it’s even begun. Alan Parker’s achievement is to refuse that reduction. He doesn’t direct Bugsy Malone as a joke about children pretending to be adults. For the most part, he directs it as though its world were entirely coherent, and that distinction is what allows the film to survive its own absurdity.

The plot itself is hardly exceptional. Fat Sam’s criminal empire is under attack from rival gangster Dandy Dan, whose men possess a new weapon: the splurge gun. Bugsy becomes involved in the conflict whilst pursuing Blousey Brown and negotiating the attentions of Tallulah. Territory is lost, retaliation planned, alliances assembled, and the whole affair proceeds towards an inevitable confrontation. As a gangster narrative, this is elementary. Bugsy himself is charming, mobile, resourceful and fundamentally decent, but rarely contradictory. Fat Sam is funnier, Tallulah more vivid, and the gang war never develops the dramatic complexity of the films whose surfaces Parker is borrowing.

Yet that simplicity isn’t merely a weakness. Bugsy Malone is less interested in deepening the psychology of the gangster film than in reproducing its grammar under altered physical conditions. Parker preserves the adult system and changes its substance. Guns remain guns, but they fire cream. Cars remain cars, but they’re pedal-powered. Nightclubs retain their codes of glamour and performance without becoming genuinely sexualised spaces. Violence retains narrative consequence whilst losing most of its bodily force. Alcohol becomes brightly coloured liquid whose precise contents scarcely matter, and death itself is transformed into something closer to temporary exclusion from a game.

The remarkable thing is how little attention Parker calls to any of this. The cars aren’t repeatedly presented as comic props; within the film, they simply function as transport. The splurge guns aren’t treated as amusing substitutes for weapons: they possess tactical importance, confer power and alter the balance between rival gangs. The children don’t continually signal that they’re pretending. This is why the tone holds. Children at play rarely maintain an ironic distance from the worlds they invent. Once the rules have been established, those rules become temporarily absolute. A chair isn’t “like” a horse; it’s a horse. A corner of the garden becomes enemy territory. A stick acquires the authority of a weapon because everyone participating in the game accepts that it does. Bugsy Malone operates according to much the same principle: its world is ridiculous from the outside and serious from within.

That contradiction depends on considerably more technical discipline than the premise might suggest. The film was shot on 35mm with spherical lenses and composed for 1.85:1, photographed first by Peter Biziou and then principally by Michael Seresin. Precise focal-length records aren’t readily available, and there’s little value in retrospectively assigning millimetres to shots without evidence. What can be observed is the effect. The lensing rarely announces itself. There’s little aggressive wide-angle distortion and little conspicuous telephoto abstraction. Faces, groups and sets remain spatially intelligible. Parker is interested less in optical virtuosity than in placing bodies exactly where they need to be.

His framing is unusually controlled for a film whose premise could easily have encouraged exaggeration. Parker repeatedly knows when to isolate a face, when to hold several figures together and when the geography of a room must remain visible. Fat Sam’s office has hierarchy because people occupy it hierarchically. The speakeasy works because performers, tables, entrances and spectators are organised into a legible social space. The artificial New York street becomes convincing not because Parker attempts documentary realism, but because everybody knows how to move through it.

The sets reinforce that effect. Geoffrey Kirkland’s main street was built indoors at Pinewood and slightly reduced in scale, allowing the young cast to inhabit a recognisably adult urban environment without simply being swallowed by it. The result occasionally recalls the polished period artificiality of The Sting (1973): America remembered through cinema rather than recovered through historical realism. Suits, cars, offices, alleyways, nightclubs, gangsters and slang arrive already mediated by decades of Hollywood mythology.

Parker knew that mythology better than he knew America. Bugsy Malone is therefore not an attempt to reconstruct the US of the 1920s with historical rigour; it reconstructs an America already filtered through Cagney, Astaire, Kelly, Brando and Welles. What matters isn’t realism, but internal consistency. The visual discipline protects the premise. Had Parker filmed the children with exaggerated lenses, frantic camera movement or constant comic emphasis, every scene would have reminded us of the joke. Instead, the camera grants them the spatial authority of adults.

The same restraint is present in Gerry Hambling’s editing. Bugsy Malone rarely feels anxious about keeping a young audience’s attention. Shots are allowed to complete their dramatic function, reactions are isolated cleanly and action remains legible. The rhythm is brisk without becoming frantic, and Parker trusts the clarity of the staging rather than compensating for weak material through over-cutting.

One of the film’s central inventions also exists partly because of editing. The splurge guns didn’t actually fire cream successfully. The practical weapons fired ping-pong balls, while the impact was created separately by throwing cream at the victim. The cut joins cause to effect, and the spectator constructs the impossible weapon in the interval between the two shots. In miniature, this is the logic of the entire film: Parker provides two incompatible realities and cinema fuses them into a functioning one.

The treatment of violence follows the same principle. When Bugsy is beaten, we understand exactly what is happening, yet Parker avoids presenting the body as the site of violence. Figures descend upon him, he disappears beneath them, and the event remains comprehensible without fists repeatedly striking flesh. Violence is preserved as a relationship between aggressor and victim, threat and submission, power and defeat, while its material horror is removed.

Sexuality is handled with comparable precision. Tallulah is unmistakably assembled from the signs of an adult femme fatale: costume, posture, confidence, make-up and theatrical self-possession. Jodie Foster plays her with an assurance that gives the character more weight than the screenplay alone might suggest. Yet Parker stops before those signs become literal eroticisation. Tallulah performs the code of seduction without the camera asking us to consume her sexually. The nightclub dancers reproduce the choreography and visual vocabulary of adult entertainment whilst remaining inside the protected artificiality of the film’s world.

This principle extends across the entire film. Parker retains the adult structure but replaces the irreversible physical content. Blood becomes cream, alcohol becomes coloured drink, sexual availability becomes glamour, cars become toys and death becomes exclusion. The adult world remains recognisable because its grammar is intact, but its material consequences have been translated into forms compatible with play.

Maintaining that balance would be impressive with any cast. With approximately two hundred children and teenagers, many of them inexperienced, it becomes one of Parker’s clearest achievements. His personal history matters here. Bugsy Malone began as a story invented for his four young children during long car journeys, and he’d already spent years directing children in television commercials. By the time he made his first feature, he wasn’t approaching children as exotic performers requiring some sentimental or specialised technique. He already understood how they behaved and how directly they needed to be addressed.

More importantly, he appears to have understood what not to ask from them. The cast rehearsed for six weeks. Parker used that period not simply to drill performances, but to discover individual strengths and weaknesses, shifting roles where necessary and allowing the young actors to become familiar with the material before filming began. He encouraged spontaneity and improvisation whilst protecting the written dialogue, and he treated the performers as actors rather than as children being indulged by adults.

Accounts from the cast suggest a method based on clarity rather than psychological explanation. Instead of asking a child to analyse a complicated emotional state, Parker could simply ask for sadness, fear or happiness and allow the performer to embody it. This isn’t a lesser form of direction. It’s often better direction, because the note is playable. The performer is given a condition rather than an interpretation.

Parker also cast for presence rather than conventional technique. John Cassisi, the extraordinary Fat Sam, had never acted before Parker found him in a Brooklyn school. What Parker recognised wasn’t polish, but behaviour: a voice, a rhythm, an attitude that could become a character. At the opposite extreme stood Jodie Foster, already extraordinarily experienced at twelve and technically far more advanced than most of the cast. Yet both belong to the same film because Parker doesn’t force the children into a uniform style of “child acting”. He builds the frame, establishes the rules and allows different kinds of presence to function inside them.

That may be one reason the performances retain so much freshness. Natural behaviour is placed inside an artificial form. The children aren’t asked to parody adulthood, but neither are they forced into grotesque imitations of adult psychology. They inhabit clear roles: boss, singer, rival, lover, hero. The form around them is controlled enough to give those roles weight.

This is where Bugsy Malone becomes more interesting than its premise. The film doesn’t simply infantilise the adult world. It exposes how much of that world already consists of roles, conventions, costumes, gestures and collectively maintained rules. A gangster is powerful because other people recognise the signs of his power. Territory matters because everybody behaves as though it matters. Reputation produces consequences because a community agrees that reputation must be defended. Hierarchy becomes real through repeated acts of recognition.

The children make that mechanism unusually visible because their bodies never quite disappear into the roles they perform. However seriously Fat Sam behaves as a crime boss, the spectator retains a simultaneous awareness that this is a child enacting the form of a crime boss. That gap between role and body is the film’s most productive space.

Seen through this arrangement, adult institutions can begin to look like systems that have forgotten their own contingency. “This is how things work” replaces “this is how we have decided things should work”, and the children make that shift unusually visible. Their seriousness reveals the strength of the system, while their childhood reveals that the system need not be mistaken for nature.

This doesn’t mean Bugsy Malone should be inflated into a conscious political allegory. There’s no need to attribute a systematic philosophy of institutions to Parker. The film’s intelligence lies in following its formal premise rigorously enough for these implications to emerge without being announced. Parker builds a functioning world first and allows meaning to follow from the way that world operates.

The adult singing voices are perhaps the most conspicuous rupture in this coherence. Unlike the cars or the splurge guns, they don’t belong seamlessly to the material rules of the world. They introduce an overt split between body and voice, child and adult, image and sound. The effect remains bizarre, but it’s also strangely appropriate. An adult voice emerges from a child’s body in a film already devoted to children inhabiting adult forms. Even an awkward production choice ends up reinforcing the film’s central division between role and body.

The weaknesses of the screenplay nevertheless remain real. Once the rules of the world have been grasped, the narrative itself rarely surprises, and some relationships might have sustained greater tension without sacrificing clarity. The gang war works efficiently enough as a structure, but not as a particularly gripping dramatic engine.

There’s also a structural limit to how far Parker could have gone. A psychologically dense gangster tragedy performed by children would have altered the nature of the game. The roles need to remain sufficiently clear for the world to remain reversible. Once genuine trauma, irreversible betrayal or death entered the film, its governing contract would collapse.

That reversibility is what makes the ending possible. For most of the film, cream means violence. It’s ammunition, it marks defeat and it belongs to the rules of conflict. Then the final confrontation dissolves. Cream ceases to signify death and becomes cream again. Everybody throws it at everybody else, enemy distinctions collapse, and the war loses its seriousness because the agreement sustaining that seriousness has been withdrawn.

Nothing material has changed; what changes is the shared meaning attached to the object. This shift transforms the final song, “You Give a Little Love”, from merely cheerful sentiment into something structurally necessary. Its message is deliberately simple: hostility can end, divisions can be abandoned and people can choose to behave differently. In another film such a conclusion might feel naïve. Here, naivety belongs to the architecture because children possess a freedom adults often lose: they can take a game completely seriously and then simply stop playing it.

Nobody has truly died. No wound is irreversible. No trauma has accumulated to the point at which reconciliation would become dishonest. The world has been constructed precisely so that violence can remain serious within the game without becoming permanent outside it. The possibility of exit has been present from the beginning.

That may be the most quietly radical thing about this extraordinarily cheerful film. The children spend ninety minutes reproducing an adult world of hierarchy, competition, violence, ambition and seduction with complete conviction. Yet once the game ends, its structures lose their authority almost instantly. Adults are much less inclined to remember that the systems they inhabit were constructed at all.

Bugsy Malone is therefore more successful than its novelty initially suggests. It’s not a great narrative, but its achievement is configurational: direction, performance, production design, cinematography and editing all maintain the same precarious boundary between reality and play.

Parker’s first feature demonstrates something his later career would confirm. He was not merely an image-maker, but a director capable of organising performers, space, rhythm and technical departments around a single tonal law. The children take the game seriously, Parker takes the children seriously, and because he does, Bugsy Malone can suggest that some of the things adults regard as permanent, natural and inescapable may simply be games whose rules we have forgotten we invented — and, unlike children, forgotten that we can stop playing.

UK •  USA | 1976 | 93 MINUTES | 1.85:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH •  ITALIAN • FRENCH

Cast & Crew

writer & director: Alan Parker.
starring: Scott Baio, Florrie Dugger, Jodie Foster, John Cassisi & Martin Lev.

The post BUGSY MALONE (1976) appeared first on Frame Rated.

Overshadowed by uncontested classics in the filmographies of its director and leading man, The Desperate Hours is rarely heard of these days. Yet it deserves to be, and not only for the contributions of Humphrey Bogart (nearing the end of his career) and William Wyler (at the peak of his). Fredric March and Martha Scott also deliver fine performances, Lee Garmes’s cinematography stylishly supports the narrative, and the screenplay by Joseph Hayes—who wrote the source novel and play—is constructed with great skill.

The film is not perfect, but these qualities are refreshing in a movie that could easily have descended into melodrama and cheap sensationalism, given its subject matter: The Desperate Hours is a relatively early example of the home-invasion genre. The phrase itself was hardly used in the 1950s, only becoming common in the 1980s, but Hollywood writers hadn’t ignored the idea’s potency. The nearly contemporary Beware, My Lovely (1952) is one example, as is Key Largo (1948)—a much better-known Bogart vehicle than The Desperate Hours—though in that case it’s technically a hotel invasion.

The premise had grown more popular in the post-war years, perhaps owing to an increased awareness of threats close to home in the form of Communist subversives: The Desperate Hours was released just after the end of Joseph McCarthy’s reign of terror. More broadly, it falls into a category of films about peaceful men forced to act in defence of their families or communities, alongside legendary titles such as High Noon (1952), Shane (1953), and Cape Fear (1962). Again, this may well connect to the idea that protecting the country was now down to ordinary people as much as the authorities.

Hayes based his novel and subsequent play loosely on a real incident in Philadelphia, but set The Desperate Hours in Indianapolis—a city rarely featured prominently on screen and lacking a strong image in the public imagination: a place that could easily stand for anywhere in the United States. The very first shot sets that scene by showing an ordinary suburban street, comfortable without being conspicuously wealthy—whistling children, a small dog running across the road, a boy delivering newspapers—before getting straight down to business.

A radio announcer broadcasts news of the escape of three convicts from a nearby prison, led by Griff (played by Bogart, though we don’t meet him yet). Without delay, The Desperate Hours moves to the local sheriff’s office, where we meet Deputy Bard (Arthur Kennedy), the man who previously captured Griff, breaking the criminal’s jaw in the process. Then it’s back to suburbia for a view of a house framed from inside a car—the car of the three fugitives,though cleverly we aren’t allowed to see them yet.

Soon enough we do: Bogart’s Griff, his much younger brother Hal (Dewey Martin), and Kobish (Robert Middleton), a large, apparently rather slow-witted man (“He’s only got half a brain, if that,” says Griff). They enter the house and hold the resident family at gunpoint: Mr Hilliard (March), Mrs Hilliard (Scott), their strong-willed, near-adult daughter Cindy (Mary Murphy), and their young son Ralphy (Richard Eyer). The rest of the film switches back and forth between the family and the police, focusing far more on the former, and frequently surprises the viewer by stepping outside the domestic setting. Mr Hilliard is sent on errands; Cindy is also allowed out with her boyfriend (Gig Young) so as not to raise suspicion.

This may not be entirely plausible, and the whole story is a bit far-fetched if looked at objectively, but it’s a mark of Hayes’s smart writing. Throughout The Desperate Hours, Hayes takes great care to extract as much tension and variety as possible from his characters’ predicament. The three fugitives are waiting for a female accomplice to bring them money, providing the narrative with a ticking clock. Griff’s desire for revenge against Deputy Bard heightens the stakes for both of them and opens up divisions among the crooks, even if this theme sometimes gets lost as other plot developments come to the fore.

Above all, forcing the family to work with the fugitives rather than against them—trying to avoid police involvement in the hope that the intruders will leave without resorting to violence—adds complexity to all the main characters’ relationships. Although The Desperate Hours is frequently considered a film noir, and even features a late shot of Bogart in classic noir chiaroscuro style (half-lit and half in darkness), the movie isn’t in the slightest morally ambiguous—though it often feels as though it’s about to head that way.

Bogart’s Griff is an intriguing character. Mrs Hilliard calls him a “cruel, inhuman, filthy” game-player—but is he?Most of the time he seems reasonable, but at others he struggles with the stress of the situation, and there are hints that his resentment of pillar-of-society figures like Mr Hilliard—as well as Bard—might get the better of his undoubted intelligence. The part could have been written for Bogart, and to some extent was; Paul Newman, a quarter of a century younger, played Griff on stage, but the character was aged for the screen so Bogart could take the role. Bogart compared Griff to his Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest (1936), but his performance also recalls his Fred C. Dobbs in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), both in his initial geniality and in the way the cracks later show. It may have been a familiar role for Bogart, but here, in his penultimate film (his health was already failing, and he died little more than a year after its release), he shows why he was such a compelling villain.

The other fugitives are less captivating: Martin’s Hal is bland, and while Middleton’s Kobish is satisfyingly threatening, he carries something of the unintentionally comic feel of a silent-movie baddie. But the Hilliard family is more believable, their interpersonal bonds feel realistic, and all the actors playing them excel—especially March as the father (a role played by Karl Malden on stage) and Scott as the mother. Mr Hilliard acts tough with the intruders (“Get out of my house”), but he’s mild enough with his family, and until the end we’re never quite sure whether his defiance toward Griff is an empty sham or an indicator of hidden strength. His wife’s resolve in dealing with the intruders is quieter, but if anything, that makes it feel more solid.

Wyler’s production team contributes as much as the cast to making The Desperate Hours so gripping. Camera movement and editing subtly maintain tension, contrasts of diegetic light and shadow heighten the climax, and busy,cluttered sets add to the realism. Gail Kubik, a celebrated classical composer at the time though barely remembered today, wrote the score—and adapted a standalone orchestral piece from it—though it was heavily cut for the theatrical release.

Michael Cimino’s 1990 remake, Desperate Hours, was a disaster both critically and commercially, but Wyler’s film has stood the test of time well. It falls squarely into the mainstream of the era—it isn’t a groundbreaking movie (except in its use of the VistaVision process), and its noirish elements are far from extravagant or mannered. But it’s exceptionally well-made in every respect, and thoroughly engrossing from start to finish.

USA | 1955 | 112 MINUTES | 1.37:1 | BLACK & WHITE | ENGLISH

Limited Edition Blu-ray Special Features:

• High Definition (1080p) Blu-ray presentation, with restoration by Arrow Films from a 6K scan of the original VistaVision negative. The Desperate Hours was one of the first films shot in VistaVision—Paramount’s newly developed rival to 20th Century Fox’s CinemaScope widescreen format—and the first VistaVision production in black and white. This high-grain process provides a finely detailed image that this fantastically crisp restoration makes the most of; if you want to see individual whiskers on Humphrey Bogart’s cheek, this is the disc for you. Greys are rich, lighting is subtle, and cinematographer Lee Garmes’s deep focus is crystal-clear. An interesting illustration of the difference made by VistaVision comes early in the movie, where we see the Hilliards’ house through the window of the crooks’ car; because the new format required bulky cameras feeding the film horizontally rather than vertically, they presumably couldn’t fit one inside a vehicle, and a conventional camera was used instead. Its comparatively low resolution is striking.
• Original restored lossless mono audio.
• Audio commentary by Daniel Kremer. The filmmaker and film historian contributes a highly knowledgeable, wide-ranging commentary that functions as a spoken essay. It rarely relates directly to what’s on screen, and there’s no film audio present during the track, but the absence of this distraction may be fortunate: his stream-of-consciousness observations can become quite convoluted.
• Trouble in Suburbia, an appreciation of the film by José Arroyo, associate professor in film and television studies at the University of Warwick.
• The Lonely Man, a visual essay by Eloise Ross, co-curator of the Melbourne Cinémathèque.
• Scaled Down and Ratcheted Up, an audio interview with Catherine Wyler, daughter of the director.
• Gallery of 16 original lobby cards.
• Optional English subtitles.
• Reversible sleeve featuring newly commissioned artwork by Jennifer Dionisio.
• Collectors’ booklet featuring writing on the film by Philip Kemp and Neil Sinyard.

Cast & Crew

director: William Wyler.
writer: Joseph Hayes & Jay Dratler (uncredited) (based on Joseph Hayes’s 1954 novel & 1955 play).
starring: Humphrey Bogart, Fredric March, Arthur Kennedy, Martha Scott & Dewey Martin.

The post THE DESPERATE HOURS (1955) appeared first on Frame Rated.

This is one of those films movie buffs already know of, even if they haven’t had a chance to view it, and it’s been on my radar for some time. A DVD copy has sat on my shelves for a decade or more, yet I never managed to find the right time for this three-hour, black-and-white, Polish-language philosophical fantasy romp. But with this new 4K restoration from Radiance, scanned from the original camera negative, I could no longer resist.

The Saragossa Manuscript / Rękopis znaleziony w Saragossie comes highly recommended by several distinguished cinéastes. Presented by Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, it was endorsed by David Lynch and loved by Jerry Garcia of The Grateful Dead—which is why it’s often described as a counterculture classic. Classic it may be, but there’s nothing particularly countercultural about it. Certainly not in the sense of Roger Corman’s The Trip (1967), Bob Rafelson’s Head (1968), or Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider (1969), though it does resonate with later entries in the category, like Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain (1973) and Robert Fuest’s The Final Programme (1973).

It’s cited as a masterpiece of Polish cinema and one of the most important cinematic works of Surrealism—both more apt descriptions for this puzzling picaresque portmanteau. But does it live up to such high expectations?

It reminded me most of Luis Buñuel’s best films, especially Viridiana (1961) and The Exterminating Angel (1962),both of which wouldn’t seem out of place if chopped up and dropped into the fractured narrative as additional vignettes. Buñuel is yet another important filmmaker who championed The Saragossa Manuscript. Its influence becomes evident in his later philosophical satires The Milky Way (1969), The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie(1972), and The Phantom of Liberty (1974). Anyone who enjoyed those titles should certainly seek out and immerse themselves in the equally challenging, similarly unorthodox opus of Wojciech Jerzy Has.

The story opens at the tail end of a battle between Napoleonic soldiers and the Spanish resistance that’s turned Saragossa into a ghost town. It’s immediately clear from Mieczysław Jahoda’s beautiful widescreen cinematography and the generous use of pyrotechnics that this isn’t a small arthouse offering, but a lavish production backed by a respectable budget. As such, what follows is endlessly surprising because it’s certainly not what you expect from a major mainstream movie.

The battle hasn’t gone well for Napoleon’s army, and an officer (Igor Przegrodzki) seeks refuge in an abandoned inn.There, he peruses the pages of an impressively large book, captivated by illustrations suggesting an intriguing story of macabre mystery and erotic promise. He becomes so engrossed that he barely registers the Spanish soldiers attempting to capture him at gunpoint, politely asking to be allowed a little longer with the volume. After glancing at the pages, the Spanish officer (Gustaw Lutkiewicz) sends his men away and joins his enemy at the table—revealing the core theme that storytelling can help us find common ground. Equally enraptured, he begins translating the text, which he claims is the story of his own grandfather…

Although this prologue acts as a framing story, we never return to the war-torn world of the French and Spanish officers. Instead, the tale of Alfonse Van Worden (Zbigniew Cybulski), a newly appointed Captain of the Walloon Guard, becomes another framing device to contain a series of nested narratives that continually unravel and entwine.Van Worden has been tasked with finding a direct route to Madrid to take up his commission. Despite a warning from a local gypsy, he decides to travel via a mountain pass where demons dwell. He becomes separated from his squire and seeks shelter in an abandoned inn, falling asleep while waiting to be found.

What follows may be a dream or a ghostly encounter. Van Worden is introduced to two Moorish princesses, Emina (Iga Cembrzyńska) and Zibelda (Joanna Jędryka), recognisable from an illustration glimpsed earlier in the big book. Their exotic attire isn’t period-correct, instead reflecting eroticised notions of harem costumes found in illustrations for One Thousand and One Nights—possibly the earliest example of a portmanteau assembled within a framing story, dating back to the 11th century. It’s a collection of tales, some containing further stories and multi-layered narratives that provided a template for The Saragossa Manuscript. In a typical male harem fantasy, Van Worden is seduced by the two young women—who’ve been raised “hidden from the eyes of men”. He then drinks from a chalice fashioned from a human skull and passes out. This isn’t the last we’ll see of the chalice or the princesses.

Accompanied by an evocative, decidedly spooky score from maverick modernist composer Krzysztof Penderecki, Van Worden awakes in the shadow of a gallows where the corpses of two hanged bandits dangle—another image seen earlier as an illustration. Disorientated, he staggers on until he’s taken in by a hermit (Kazimierz Opaliński), who prompts him to tell his own story, beginning with how his father (Sławomir Lindner) met his mother (Mirosława Lombardo). This is the first of several tales examining the dynamics between fathers and sons. It’s followed almost immediately by the story of Pacheco, the goat herd (Franciszek Pieczka), whom the hermit explains is possessed by demons. His story is uncannily similar to Van Worden’s experiences, right down to a male harem fantasy about two sisters, one of whom is his stepmother. At the end of his tale, he also awakes under the same gallows, where zombies attacked him and plucked out one of his eyes. For me, The Saragossa Manuscript is at its best when embracing these folkloric elements.

Next, suspected of being demonically possessed himself, Van Worden is arrested by the Spanish Inquisition. For a while, it seems we’re heading into full-blooded Gothic horror—Van Worden is even fitted with a metal demon mask reminiscent of Mario Bava’s Black Sunday (1960). Alas, that’s as far as the similarity goes; his torture is cut short by the intervention of Emina and Zibelda, who whisk him back to the inn. However, their father awaits to condemn Van Worden to death for sullying the princesses. Prepared to meet his fate with honour, he drinks the poison from the skull chalice… and awakes in the shadow of the gallows once more. Just as things start getting a tad frustrating—we’re already about 90 minutes in—a stranger appears. Introducing himself as a Kabbalist (Adam Pawlikowski), he provides a bridge into part two, where things get both more interesting and more confusing.

The segment set in the Kabbalist’s castle is a highlight, sharing a striking aesthetic resonance with Jean Cocteau’s Orphic Trilogy (1930–1960), which tackled similar grand themes. Both share a fascination with high magic and occult philosophies, though Cocteau confronts what Has merely skirts around. Of course, Cocteau had the advantage of being the singular creative voice from script to screen, whereas Has makes a valiant attempt at adapting a sprawling mess of a novel that had been deemed unfilmable.

The source material is an epic, Chaucerian work by Count Jan Potocki, published in instalments from 1805 until his suicide in 1815. The remaining sections were published posthumously, though it remains unclear whether the book was ever truly finished. The full manuscript interweaves 33 distinct strands; while some elements are merged and simplified in Tadeusz Kwiatkowski’s multifaceted screenplay, the film jettisons about two-thirds of them to give us an extra dénouement that could only have been conceived in the aftermath of Surrealism.

Although Potocki was a respected Polish writer, known mainly for his extensive travelogues, he wrote Manuscrit trouvé à Saragosse in French, and a Polish translation wasn’t available until 1847. It’s a notable literary achievement that pastiches the Rabelaisian tradition of a narrator telling satirical and sometimes bawdy tales. It also invites comparison with other late Gothic literature, particularly Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron. In some ways, it embraced the Gothic revival ahead of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) and John William Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819).

Indeed, Count Potocki may have embraced Gothic notions a little too enthusiastically as his mental health declined. It’s said that his suicide via a self-inflicted gunshot was partly driven by the belief that he was a werewolf and posed a danger to others. Scholars now debate whether he actually used a silver bullet but with this context, the film’s recurring images of death and occult symbolism land rather differently.

However, the narratives really get going in part two, when the gypsy king, Don Avadoro (Leon Niemczyk), arrives at the Kabbalist’s castle and regales Van Worden with several stories, some containing their own storytellers. His tales are the most fun, packed with swashbuckling duels, farcical bedroom antics, and action approaching burlesque and pure slapstick. It’s about time things got this lively, given we’ve already sat through the equivalent of a standard feature film.

Don Avadoro’s storytelling is overtly gendered and caters to masculine fantasies, though the scheming women consistently get the better of the men in a supposedly male world. There’s an abundance of alluring women in Hammer-horror-style diaphanous gowns with dangerously low-cut bodices—a big plus for some viewers, and something I certainly didn’t mind.

He begins with his own, clearly embellished story before telling the tale of the young, brazen Frasquetta (Elżbieta Czyżewska), who outwits both her husband, Don Diego Salero (Janusz Kłosiński), and the ‘Jack-the-lad’ chancer Don Roque Busqueros (Zdzisław Maklakiewicz), who dominates the second half. We come full circle with Van Worden’s reunion with the two Moorish princesses and their father, whom we now recognise as the hermit. By this point, the narrative structure has broken down entirely, leaving us unable to track whose story we’re actually in.

Wojciech Has refuses to offer closure, leaving many of the braided narrative threads unresolved. The ending is either a clever conceit or a complete cop-out, fully embracing the surrealist pretensions hinted at throughout. If you don’t try to hold too tightly to a rational explanation and simply enjoy the mystery and milieu, it’s an entertaining enough three-hour sojourn. However, I’m not sure the entertainment value quite compensated for the time invested. I relished the rich mise-en-scène alongside the wonderful production design, enjoyed how the locations were shot like a spaghetti western, and was carried along by the vigorous performances of a talented cast—but, ultimately, I remain ambivalent.

POLAND | 1965 | 182 MINUTES | 2.35:1 | BLACK & WHITE | POLISH

4K Ultra HD & Blu-ray Dual Format Special Features:

• NEW 4K restoration from the original camera negative, presented in Dolby Vision HDR.
• 4K UHD and Blu-ray presentation of the feature (world premiere on 4K UHD).
• Uncompressed mono PCM audio.
• NEW and improved English subtitle translation.
• The Saragossa Labyrinth — NEW visual essay on the cinema of Wojciech Has and The Saragossa Manuscript by Polish film expert Michael Brooke (2026, 69 mins). This is a clearly well-researched, scholarly discussion placing both the original text and the film within their respective contextual and historical frameworks. Brooke summarises the eventful life of Count Jan Potocki, revealing him to have been an explorer, aviator, and adventurer with an insatiable curiosity. He then provides a detailed overview of Has’s career, discussing each of his 14 feature films and identifying themes that run through them—with class division and the resulting power gradients driving many of their narratives. He zooms in on The Saragossa Manuscript and the Polish film industry of the era, when the movie was one of three superprodukcje made almost in parallel, along with Andrzej Wajda’s The Ashes (1965) and Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s Pharaoh (1966). These were the Polish equivalent of big Hollywood productions intended to have mass appeal, but in keeping with the cultural intellectualism of post-war Poland, they were far from ‘popcorn’ crowd-pleasers and demanded literary gravitas. Brooke then covers the key cast and crew, providing the kind of background information normally found in audio commentaries while offering his own insight and analysis throughout.
• Saragossa — archival making-of documentary made for Polish television, featuring Wojciech Has, cinematographer Mieczyslaw Jahoda, production designer Jerzy Skarżyński, and assistant director Barbara Sass-Zdort (1998, 29 mins). The director aptly sums up his opus as “a crazy, three-hour dream journey through Spain” before sharing insights into his thought process while planning and shooting the movie. He places the production within the socio-political climate of early-1960s Poland and discusses the dominant philosophies that informed the film, including Surrealism, Realism, and Socialist Realism. We learn that the core creative team had been friends since youth and shared an unspoken rapport. Additional comments from Jahoda, Skarżyński, and assistant production manager Barbara Pec-Ślesicka lend valuable technical insight. Contributions from the principal cast help build a picture of what seems to have been an enjoyable, memorable filmmaking experience as they share warm recollections and behind-the-scenes anecdotes.
• Limited Edition booklet featuring new writing by author David Hering and archival writing by Annette Insdorf. Not available at time of review.
• Reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Time Tomorrow.
• Limited Edition of 5000 copies, presented in full-height Scanavo packaging with removable OBI strip leaving packaging free of certificates and markings.

Cast & Crew

director: Wojciech Has.
writer: Tadeusz Kwiatkowski (based on the novel ‘The Manuscript Found in Saragossa’ by Count Jan Potocki).
starring: Zbigniew Cybulski, Iga Cembrzynska, Elzbieta Czyzewska, Gustaw Holoubek, Stanislaw Igar, Joanna Jedryka, Janusz Klosinski, Bogumil Kobiela, Zdzislaw Maklakiewicz, Leon Niemczyk & Adam Pawlikowski.

The post THE SARAGOSSA MANUSCRIPT (1965) appeared first on Frame Rated.

At the turn of the millennium, Hollywood’s output had begun to show unmistakable signs of exhaustion. While Hong Kong virtuoso John Woo was recruited to invigorate American actioners like Hard Target (1993) and Face/Off (1997), established horror franchises were resorting to increasingly absurd premises to remain culturally relevant. Friday the 13th eventually sent Jason Voorhees into space to decapitate astronauts in Jason X (2001), and Wes Craven’s subversive slasher Scream (1996) had gradually become a formulaic franchise in its own right, surrounded by countless derivative imitators. The unexpected commercial success of The Blair Witch Project (1999) demonstrated that audiences were willing to look beyond the traditional studio system for something exciting. Independent and international cinema offered a different kind of thrill that mainstream Hollywood could no longer provide.

Across the Pacific Ocean, a new generation of Japanese filmmakers was attracting similar international attention. Hideo Nakata’s Ringu (1998) became a global success, establishing the template for what would eventually become known as J-Horror. In its wake, similar genre fare such as Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse (2001) and Takashi Shimizu’s Ju-On: The Grudge (2002) found success among Western audiences through specialist distributors and boutique labels. Yet, beneath the supernatural thrills of J-Horror existed a fraternity of filmmakers who were less interested in frightening audiences with Kabuki theatre and Japanese folklore. Instead, they wanted to instil fear by exposing the most disturbing dimensions of contemporary Japanese society. Kinji Fukasaku’s Battle Royale (2000) employed graphic bloodshed and adolescent carnage to explore social alienation and institutional authority, while Sion Sono’s Suicide Club (2001) confronted media culture and generational disaffection through taboo subjects like mass suicide and child murder.

Among the most unpredictable and punishing figures to emerge from this milieu was Takashi Miike. Having spent the 1990s amassing an astonishing body of work ranging from straight-to-video actioners to television productions, Miike had already established himself as an unusually prolific filmmaker. However, he didn’t find international recognition until he took a conventional romantic drama to sadistic new heights with Audition (1999). Arriving at the precise moment when Western audiences were becoming increasingly receptive to the “Asia Extreme” movement, its dehumanising sexual violence and unrelenting psychological cruelty left an indelible mark on filmgoers.

His subsequent works—such as the revolting black comedy Visitor Q (2001) and the delirious horror-musical The Happiness of the Katakuris (2001)—only reinforced his transgressive reputation. Yet it was Miike’s third release of that same year that would prove his most notorious. An infamous collision of Yakuza violence, sadomasochism, and grotesque black comedy, Ichi the Killer announced the filmmaker as an international provocateur.

Set against the neon-drenched backdrop of Tokyo’s criminal underworld, the mysterious disappearance of a Yakuza boss and ¥300m triggers a violent chain reaction among the remaining members of the organisation. Convinced their leader is still alive, the sadomasochistic Kakihara (Tadanobu Asano) mobilises the entire gang to uncover the truth. His obsessive investigation quickly turns into a sadistic campaign as he violently interrogates rival gang members. After torturing one operative, Kakihara learns of a mysterious assassin known as Ichi the Killer. When Ichi (Nao Omori) begins despatching members of the Yakuza, Kakihara develops an obsessive fascination with the elusive killer.Realising that Ichi will eventually come for him, he begins to relish the prospect of a confrontation, believing their encounter will bring the ultimate experience of death he’s always craved. As the two men move through the chaotic streets of Tokyo, repeatedly coming within reach of one another, the tension builds towards an inevitable collision.

When viewed through a contemporary lens, Ichi the Killer reveals just how much Miike’s penchant for anarchic displays of human viscera has softened throughout his career. The filmmaker hasn’t abandoned his violent sensibilities completely, nor has he suddenly reinvented himself as a pacifist auteur devoted to tasteful restraint. Indeed, there’s no shortage of severed limbs and arterial sprays in his more recent works, such as 13 Assassins (2010) and Yakuza Apocalypse (2015). Yet there’s something comparatively mature about the later Miike.

By comparison, Ichi the Killer almost functions as a time capsule of a career period when his impulse to shock was nearly indistinguishable from his impulse to create. Miike’s adaptation of Hideo Yamamoto’s manga remains one of the most extreme cinematic explorations of human depravity ever committed to celluloid. Working with screenwriter Sakichi Sato (Kill Bill: Vol. 1), the pair crafted an unabashed experiment in sadistic glee that practically dares the offended to voice their objections to its stomach-churning sexual violence and spectacular torture. It’s a film so unapologetic about its cruelty that its most infamous sequence involves Kakihara interrogating a rival boss while the victim is suspended from the ceiling by meat hooks. The architect of this Grand Guignol exhibit calmly drives long needles through his victim’s mouth and cheek, before pouring scalding hot oil over his body until the skin blisters and peels off.

Ichi the Killer certainly isn’t for the faint of heart, expectant mothers, or anyone with a mild aversion to graphic depictions of torture. Yet beyond the catalogue of violence, Miike is carefully attuned to the visual language of the original manga. He adapts the illustrated series with a distinctive visual style and anarchic creative energy, constructing a world in which grotesquerie and absurdity gleefully collide. Hideo Nakayama’s cinematography captures the grimy, neon-drenched atmosphere of early-2000s Tokyo with a raw immediacy, while Yasushi Shimamura’s rapid editing imbues the proceedings with a frenetic rhythm. Similarly, Michiko Kitamura’s flamboyant costume design further amplifies the manga aesthetic. Kakihara, in particular, is dressed in familiar Yakuza suits infused with an extravagant, almost feminine glam. Resembling a grotesque fashion icon rather than a conventional mafioso, his flamboyant costumes feature colourful sequins and lurid fabrics—an appropriately excessive look for a character who carves his way through flesh with perverse abandon.

What makes Miike’s work so fascinating is the way it combines an exhilarating mixture of bad taste with flashes of genuine existential insight. Anyone who witnessed the Yakuza boss waxing poetic while drowning a prostitute in her own excrement in Dead or Alive (1999), or encountered the grotesque familial tableau concluding Visitor Q, can hardly deny that the revulsion these scenes provoke often gives way to a brief moment of profundity. In its own perverse way, Ichi the Killer is a surprisingly intelligent deconstruction of our complicated relationship with violence and how society has become remarkably desensitised to it.

From the opening moments, Miike creates a world where pain and pleasure are inextricably connected. The audience is introduced to Ichi as he masturbates outside an apartment while watching a man brutally assault a woman through a window. When the assailant discovers him, Ichi flees,leaving a pool of semen in a potted plant. It’s a nauseating opening sequence, but one that reflects the audience’s own appetite for atrocity.

As the narrative progresses, we meet Kakihara, a man so obsessed with pain that he has no compunction about amputating his own tongue in a desperate bid for sensation. His sadomasochistic tendencies turn suffering into an intimate experience, and he’s fixated on the prospect of Ichi inflicting a transcendental type of pain that might penetrate his emotional numbness. Much like Kakihara when he realises Ichi cannot fulfil his violent fantasies, the audience is left underwhelmed when the pair finally meet during the film’s climax. After spending the majority of the 130-minute runtime conditioning us to anticipate a spectacular confrontation, Miike refuses to provide that cathartic release. Instead, he offers a bleak commentary on how treating extreme violence as entertainment breeds indifference. Both Ichi and Kakihara may appear to be sadists, but their actions bear an unsettling resemblance to society’s own detachment from human suffering. As Miike himself remarks on the director’s commentary: “Kakihara looks really cruel, but actually we are the cruel ones.”

Naturally, the extremity of its violence meant Ichi the Killer was met with heavy censorship and outright prohibition in several territories. In the UK, the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) took particular issue with its depiction of violence against women, demanding that several sequences involving mutilation and sexual violence be removed before granting a certificate. Elsewhere, the film was deemed too extreme for distribution altogether and was banned in Malaysia, Norway, and Germany. Its reputation as a cinematic endurance test was further amplified during its premiere at the 2001 Toronto International Film Festival, where attendees were handed vomit bags before the screening. Although intended as a tongue-in-cheek gimmick, the gesture perfectly complemented its notoriety and fanned the flames of controversy.

Despite the surrounding hype, Ichi the Killer was hardly a commercial success. Due to its limited theatrical run outside Japan, the film grossed an underwhelming $84,000 against its $1.4M production budget. Regardless, its influence on Western cinema shouldn’t be overlooked. Viewed retrospectively, Ichi the Killer stands as a crucial antecedent to the “torture porn” movement of the 2000s. While extreme cinema had existed since the 1970s, Miike’s depiction of sadomasochism and mutilation helped cultivate a greater tolerance for uncensored violence. Several years later, mainstream horror films such as Saw (2004) and Hostel (2005) began emulating his ultra-violent tendencies, placing physical pain at the centre of their appeal.

JAPAN | 2001 | 130 MINUTES | 1:85:1 | COLOUR | JAPANESE • CANTONESE • ENGLISH

Cast & Crew

director: Takashi Miike.
writer: Sakichi Sato (based on the manga series “Ichi The Killer” by Hideo Yamamoto).
starring: Tandanobu Asano, Nao Ōmori & Shin’ya Tsukamoto.

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