Shameless Self Expression

Set in 1950, Peter van Eyck plays a mild-mannered Austrian businessman and former Intelligence man during WW2. The sister (Helen Cherry) of an old war buddy (Christopher Lee) asks van Eyck to deliver a package to someone in West Germany and before long, van Eyck is drawn into the dangerous world of spies, a world he nonetheless seems quiet adept in. Macdonald Carey is the US spy who suspects van Eyck of working for the Commies and forces him to work as a double agent. Marianne Koch plays the love interest, Jeremy Bulloch is van Eyck’s son, Marius Goring is a one-armed, crazy General, and Billie Whitelaw plays a Russian girl van Eyck is briefly involved with.   Relatively unknown 1962 spy flick from director John Paddy Carstairs ( “The Saint in London” ) and his co-writer Robert Westerby ( “Beautiful Stranger” , “War and Peace” , Disney’s “Greyfriars Bobby” ) is solid and filled with enough recognisable names and faces that it shouldn’t be so unknown. Yes, it’s probably bottom-half

A spoiled, rich, young sociopath (Chance Hurstfield) has an unhealthy obsession with wanting Santa Claus dead after supposedly receiving a lump of coal. The brat even goes to the lengths of hiring an ice-cold hit man (Walton Goggins) to carry out a hit on jolly ‘ol St. Nick. He also wants a classmate rubbed out for beating him in a school science comp, I might add. Meanwhile, times are tough for Chris Cringle, AKA Santa Claus (Mel Gibson) and his wife (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), with subsidy cuts to his toy-making operation out of Alaska due to a spike in ‘naughty’ children. He reluctantly accepts a contract for he and his elves to build ‘toys’ for the U.S. military. Welcome to the least conventional Christmas movie you’ve seen since “Die Hard” .   Although the first half is more enjoyable than the action/thriller theatrics of the second half, this 2020 oddity from writer-director-brothers Eshom & Ian Nelms ( “Small Town Crime” ) still ends up with a soft recommendation from me.

Ethan Hawke stars as Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla, in a biopic narrated by Anne (Eve Hewson), the daughter of George Westinghouse (Jim Gaffigan). The film chronicles Tesla’s dealings with the likes of Westinghouse, egotistical Thomas Edison (Kyle MacLachlan) and J.P. Morgan (Donnie Keshawarz).   The kind of unconventional, ‘innovative’ biopic that you’ll either go with or entirely resist, this 2020 film about the infamous inventor comes from writer-director Michael Almereyda (who made the arty vampire flick “Nadja” back in 1994). I very, very much resisted just about every frame of it. Wasting decent performances by Ethan Hawke and Kyle MacLachlan, the writer-director gets in the way of his own period story with asides featuring a laptop, the internet, and most embarrassingly of all, Hawke as Tesla performing Tears for Fears’ 80s hit ‘Everybody Wants to Rule the World’. At one point, a character seen using the internet in the modern asides then becomes a character in the period

A 16 th Century England tale of puritanical tyranny and witchcraft as Vincent Price stars as a ruthless lord and magistrate who puts the followers of a witch (Elizabeth Bergner) to death. Her life spared, Bergner prepares to carry out her vengeance on the sadistic Price and his family. Patrick Mower plays a young servant, Hugh Griffith plays a gravedigger, Stephen Chase is Price’s nasty son, and Marshall Jones plays the very serious-faced local vicar.   Although not remotely well-regarded by critics, this 1970 blend of “Witchfinder General” and the Roger Corman series of Edgar Allen Poe adaptations is actually quite underrated. Directed by Gordon Hessler (The disappointing duo of “The Oblong Box” and “Scream and Scream Again” ), it’s certainly got some flaws, but I get the feeling that the people who hate this film saw the heavily cut U.S. version. Although he was apparently not too fond of the violence in some of his later films, Vincent Price is in jolly good form here playing