Paris, 13th District (2021)
Where’s it on? Cinemas nationwide
Coming back in off the range after his unexpected western The Sisters Brothers (2018), Jacques Audiard’s latest finds him playing on home turf again, spinning a chain of happenstance and romance out of the lives of four highly-sexed and interconnected young adults living in a high-rise block in Paris’s 13th arrondissement. The stories are derived from the 2015 book Killing and Dying by comic-book artist Adrian Tomine, transplanted from the US and shot in gleaming black and white.
Boulevard! A Hollywood Story (2021)
Where’s it on? BFI Player as part of BFI Flare
A little-known bit of Hollywood lore gets ready for its close-up in this latest documentary from Jeffrey Schwarz, who’s previously brought us docs on the likes of Divine, William Castle and Tab Hunter. Long before Andrew Lloyd Webber put songs to Sunset Boulevard, it seems Norma Desmond herself, Gloria Swanson, had conceived of mounting Billy Wilder’s classic film as a Broadway show. Schwarz’s film absorbingly tells the project’s fateful story, which sees Swanson falling unrequitedly in love with Richard Stapley, a young, British, secretly gay heart-throb actor who she hires to help write the songs.
Deep Water (2022)
Where’s it on? Prime Video
A full 20 years after his previous film, 2002’s infidelity drama Unfaithful, Fatal Attraction director Adrian Lyne has made an unexpected return to our screens with this irresistible throwback to the heyday of the erotic thriller. Going direct to Prime Video, it pitches Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas as a stinking-rich married couple in Louisiana whose adulterous games take a deadly turn. Its playful self-awareness notwithstanding, Deep Water is the kind of humid potboiler Hollywood used to churn out by the dozen. Not any more though, so you’re advised to pounce on it.
Pale Flower (1964)
Where’s it on? Blu-ray
Out of prison and returning to his old card-playing haunts, a yakuza falls for a beautiful gambling addict in this smoky underworld classic of the Japanese New Wave. It’s a nocturnal piece; a gem cut out of hard-edged black-and-white cinematography and with a score by avant-garde composer Toru Takemitsu. It established the reputation of director Masahiro Shinoda, who later made the original Silence (1971), as remade by Scorsese. His other films are mainly unavailable in the UK, so this smart new Criterion Blu-ray is to be cherished.
Notorious (1946)
Where’s it on? Talking Pictures TV, Sunday, 7pm
This immaculate 1940s thriller from Alfred Hitchcock is perhaps a little overshadowed by his later masterpieces, but it’s as rich as any of them. Ingrid Bergman plays the daughter of a traitor who agrees to make amends by wooing one of her father’s old associates – a Nazi war criminal hiding out in Brazil – on behalf of the American government. Cary Grant is the US agent who falls for her even as he sends her into certain danger, while Claude Rains is no less besotted as the avuncular villain. Together they form a tortured triangle in a spy thriller knee-deep in human perversity but with no shortage of suspense along the way.
