The Baztan trilogy consists of three movies, based on the novels by Dolores Redondo. The setting for these is a small area in the Basque country of Spain, not far from the border with France. Much like the small-town English villages such as Miss Marple’s St. Mary Mead, or Death in Paradise‘s Honoré, the murder rate in this charming and picturesque area appears to rival that of a South American war-zone. I guess you can describe the series as Español negro, being a Mediterranean-based version of Nordic noir. Like those, you have a detective with a troubled past, a history that frequently seeps into her current life, They are investigating crimes resulting from what’s unquestionably the darker side of human nature, and the results are uncomfortably close to home.
In this trilogy, the heroine is Amaia Salazar, a former resident of the region who left under circumstances best described as murky. She joined the police force, rising through the ranks and going through a successful secondment to the FBI, where she distinguished herself. Amaia is now back in Spain, with her American artist husband, James. But, as ever in this kind of thing, the pull of her past is strong. She finds herself coming back to the Baztan region in which she grew up. There, the ghosts of history are lurking and ready to pose a challenge – perhaps equal to that of solving the brutal murders which are the reason for her return.
The trilogy includes the books El guardián invisible (The Invisible Guardian), Legado en los huesos (The Legacy of the Bones) and Ofrenda a la tormenta (Offering to the Storm). From 2017 through 2020, the books were made into three movies by Atresmedia Cine and its partners. Five years after the last of the books was published, Redondo wrote a prequel, La cara norte del corazón (The North Face of the Heart), describing Amaia’s youth and her time with the FBI in America. All four novels were optioned to Heyday Films for American adaptations in October 2021, but there has been almost no news since the original announcement. Still, with the Spanish movies all available on Netflix, the need for any English-language versions is questionable in my opinion. Such things rarely improve on, or even equal, the originals.
Hence, below you’ll find reviews of the three Spanish movies in order. Note: I haven’t read the books, so there will be no further discussion of them, or comparison to the films.
The Invisible Guardian
★★★½
“It’s never sunny in Baztan.”
I’ve traveled a fair bit around Spain and Mediterranean Europe in my time, and the weather was never as unremittingly grim as its depicted here. Things seem to unfold in a permanent downpour. Seriously: Chris and I pretty much were turning it into a drinking game by the end: take a swig every time a scene takes place in the rain. Only concern for the health of our livers prevented us. Googling tells me Baztan is fairly wet: around 55 inches a year. But it felt like most of that arrived during the 129 minute running-time of this film. I suspect David Fincher and Se7en have a lot to answer for, with rain = dark and foreboding atmosphere.
There’s certainly no shortage of that here, even setting meteorological considerations aside. It begins with the discovery of a young girl’s corpse by a river, stripped naked except for a local cake placed on her crotch. Pamplona detective Amaia Salazar (Etura) makes the connection to a previous murder and is sent to Baztan to take over the case. It’s the town where she grew up, and she still has family there. Though relations are still strained with her sister Flora (Mínguez), who runs a bakery in the town. She feels Amaia abandoned the family by “running off” to the United States. It’s not long before we discover their mother had issues, physically abusing Amaia as a child.
However, the main focus is the murders, with further victims turning up, all young girls whose bodies are posed in the same, ritualistic way. The investigation reveals these may be the latest in a series of killings going back fourteen years, which appear to be some kind of moral crusade by the perpetrator. Amaia gets into trouble with her colleagues, because one of the victims was having an affair with her brother-in-law, and she also conceals evidence connecting Flora’s bakery to the cake. She ends up being replaced on the case by Montés (Orella). If you think that’s going to stop Amaia, you clearly haven’t seen enough of this genre.
It does feel very much like the film could be relocated to the Scandinavian forests with very little trouble. There is some specifically local colour in the form of the “Basajaun”, a legendary – or perhaps not – creature, reputed to roam the woods. I suspect its going to play a larger part in the subsequent movies: while this does tidy up the main case, there are a number of loose ends, such as a cave containing a lot more remains. Etura does a good job of handling both the personal drama and the police elements: you may not agree with some of the choices, yet you can see why she made them. Amaia has been through hell, and that she still made something of her life is an admirable trait. A solid enough opening, which even lured Chris off her phone.
Dir: Fernando González Molina
Star: Marta Etura, Elvira Mínguez, Carlos Librado “Nene”, Francesc Orella
The Legacy of the Bones
★★★★
“Skeletons in the closet”
We jump ahead about a year for the second installment. Amaia Salazar (Etura) has now had the baby she announced she was expecting during the first film, and is adjusting to the need for balance between her career and motherhood, with her husband, James. After completing her maternity leave, she returns to work, and is put on a case of church desecration with cult undertones, at the request of the enigmatic Fr. Sarasola (Arias). This is tied to the Cagots, a historically persecuted group native to the region. Simultaneously, there is an ongoing string of murderers committing suicide, each leaving behind a one-word message: “Tartalo”. It’s a reference to a baby-eating giant from Basque mythology, and seems to be linked to the cave of remains found in the previous film.
Both cases take a deeply-personal turn, reflecting the family of Amaia’s long-standing association with the area. When tested for DNA, the bones left on the church altar are a match for her genetics, and her abusive mother Rosario (Sánchez), now kept in a psychiatric facility, scrawls “Taratalo” on the floor of the room in blood, after attacking an orderly. Amaia is forced to uncover some very unpleasant truths about the history of her family – and, indeed, the way the region in general dealt with children perceived as unwanted or problematic. Her newborn son becomes part of the scenario as it unfolds, pushing the heroine close to the edge, as she picks her way towards solving the crimes of both the past and present.
This goes into some thoroughly dark places, building on the heavy atmosphere set up in the previous movie. For example, we already knew that Rosario is dangerous, and a patently unfit mother. But what we see her do in this film, goes beyond the mere abuse we previously saw. It’s fortunate that Amaia has a strong support network elsewhere in her family, such as Aunt Tía (Aixpuru), who can offer advice and assistance to help keep her niece on the relatively straight and narrow. To be honest, the revelations here would shake anyone to their core, and it’s testament to the heroine’s strength of character, that she is still able to function as a police detective, while the foundations of her life are being pulled out from under her.
The script does a very good job of keeping the multiple plot-threads functioning, moving each forward in turn, as information regarding the situation is discovered. While avoiding spoilers, it is a little hard to believe Amaia would be so in the dark about the situation in regard to her own family: you’d think Tia might have said something? However, there is an almost relentless grimness of tone here – and a lot more rain as well, with a flooded town being integral to the plot – which pulled me in with the inevitability of a rip tide. It might just about work as a standalone entity, yet you will certainly get more out of this, if you’ve seen the first movie and know where it’s coming from.
Dir: Fernando González Molina
Star: Marta Etura, Itziar Aizpuru, Imanol Arias, Susi Sánchez
Offering to the Storm
★★
“Gale force disappointment.”
Oh, dear. I think it’s probably been a very long while since I’ve been so underwhelmed by the finale of a trilogy. All the pieces were in place, after the first two entries, for a grandstand finish to the series. But the script basically fumbles things in every conceivable way, pushing to the front elements that you really don’t care about, while all but discarding things that seemed of crucial importance. There is an effort to tie everything together, with the various crimes from its predecessors being linked into an occult conspiracy in which members of a Satanic circle sacrifice baby girls, and receive worldly power in exchange. This aspect is okay, Amaia having to go up against a group whose power is embedded at the highest levels of local society. The creepiest element is perhaps that the sacrifices seem to work, though nobody seems too bothered about this.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t gel well with the elements carried forward from the first two movies, and a lot of the elements that should be shocking or disturbing simple are not. The worst example is the identity of the cult’s “inside man”, which is so painfully obvious, you may find yourself yelling at the screen, and Amaia as she ploughs on with her investigation, completely oblivious to the threat. Little less blatant is the plot thread where husband James (Northover) is going back to America because his father is ill. We’ve seen enough in this genre to know that there is no possible way Amaia is going to end up accompanying him, regardless of how much she promises she will. The film seems convinced it is the first ever to use this device, to demonstrate how its dedicated, troubled detective has her priorities skewed.
This somewhat ties into the whole fidelity subplot, which did nothing except make us (Chris especially) lose empathy for the lead character. In this installment, Amaia just does not seem as “heroic” as previously. I get that the pressure on her is building. But I would have preferred it to lean into the saying, “Hard times breed strong women.” There’s just too many occasions on which she breaks down and starts sobbing instead. Some of it may be justified: there’s the uncertainty about the fate of her mother, for example, who was last seen plunging into a flood-swollen mountain river. This is resolved. In about the least satisfactory way possible. At least it is addressed. Remember the “Basajaun”? Because the makers here clearly did not.
At 139 minutes, this is the longest of the trilogy, and you’ll be forgiven if you think it feels that way too. Rather than being led by the film, all too often we found ourselves ahead of it, and then having to wait for the plot and characters to catch up with what we had already figured out. We also ended up rolling our eyes heavily at some of the plot developments, such as the mother of a sacrificed baby acquiring some dynamite and using it to blow open the vault where her child is buried. Wait, what? It’s a shame, that after two films which did so much right, the third does goes wrong in so many different ways.
Dir: Fernando González Molina
Star: Marta Etura, Leonardo Sbaraglia, Carlos Librado “Nene”, Benn Northover
Back when I reviewed 
Mission: Impossible 2 (2000) – Thandie Newton as Nyah Nordoff-Hall
Mission: Impossible – Fallout (2018) – Vanessa Kirby as Alanna Mitsopolis, the White Widow
With a lot of voice-overs, the style feels reminiscent of Dragnet, which had been a very popular show for most of the fifties. Each episode opens with a stern reminder: “Presented as a tribute to the Bureau of Policewomen, Police Department, City of New York,” and centre on the cases worked by Patricia “Casey” Jones (Garland). As the title suggests, most of them involve Jones going undercover in some guise. That covers an extremely broad range of assignments, from a photographer to a junkie, a nurse to a blackmailer, a high society girl to a prisoner. However, some of the episodes do not require such subterfuge, though there is a tendency for these crimes she is given for investigation to be fairly gynocentric, e.g. trying to find a delinquent father.
This article was inspired by my mild irritation at documentary film 
This bio-pic of aviator Amy Johnson appeared in British cinemas a scant eighteen months after she disappeared over the River Thames. That put its release squarely in the middle of World War II, and explains its nature which, in the later stages, could certainly be called propaganda. There’s not many other ways to explain pointed lines like “Our great sailors won the freedom of the seas. And it’s up to us to win the freedom of the skies. This is first said during a speech given by Johnson in Australia, then repeated at the end, over a rousing montage of military marching and flying. I almost expected it to end with, “Do you want to know more?”
It’s interesting to compare the approach taken in this biopic of aviation heroine Amy Johnson, made in 1984, with the one over 40 years earlier (and shortly after her death) in 
It’s always interesting to look back at the 
Dominique: Rise of the Phoenix (January)
Night Train (January 13)
But it turned out to be only the beginning. It seemed that everywhere I looked, there was another film about Joan, waiting to be found. A 1957 filmed stage play, shown on television of the time. A pre-war propaganda piece made by the Third Reich film office. A contemporary take, in which Joan becomes a right-wing political terrorist. Or all the way back to 1900, when legendary pioneer Georges Méliès made a short film, potentially the first biopic. Finally, I had to stop looking, simply because I needed this project to go to press. It remains incomplete. There are still items I’ve been unable to locate, such as 1999’s experimental feature, Wired Angel. But it has been an interesting enterprise. I think I’ve learned that, like many legendary figures from history, people will see in Joan what they want to see. The historical narrative is, as we’ll see, incomplete, and the gaps are open to personal interpretation.
★★★★
I generally make it a rule not to review foreign movies without subtitles, simply because it’s difficult to judge them reasonably if you can’t understand them. I made an exception for this 1929 French film for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it’s silent, so comprehension is limited only to the intertitles: I can read the language better than I can understand it spoken. Also, it was approximately the eleven millionth version of the Joan of Arc story I’d seen in the past month: I think I had a pretty good handle on the plot by this point. Boy, am I glad I did, because it’s the best silent film I’ve seen, albeit in my quite limited experience of them.
History has largely forgotten this version, in favour of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc. Both movies were produced concurrently, interest in the topic apparently having been spurred by the canonization of Joan at the start of the twenties, and the approaching 500th anniversary of the events in her life. However, delays during filming meant this adaptation was beaten to the cinema by Dreyer’s. It perhaps was also impacted commercially by the arrival of the new-fangled “talkies”, leaving silent movies like this looking old-fashioned. Half a century later, the film was eventually restored, and can be found on YouTube as well as 
Then there’s the burning at the stake, another scene which came uncomfortably close to historical accuracy for Genevois. “The moment the wood caught fire I yelled ‘It burns!’ [The director] Marco was so sure I was afraid, that he did nothing at all. All of a sudden the cameraman, Gaston Brun, shouted ‘She’s burning!’ and everyone ran towards me, because I was tied up and couldn’t budge. I was very frightened.” Even putting that aside, there’s no denying the emotional wallop it packs, particularly in the extended shot of Joan walking towards her death: Simone’s face, again, sells this in a way which left me genuinely distraught. This doesn’t happen often, and never before while watching any silent movie.
It’s basically impossible to separate this from the time and place in which it was made: that being Nazi Germany, just a few years before the outbreak of World War II. The portrayal of, not only Johanna/Joan of Arc, but the rest of the participants, has to be read in this light. It certainly explains why neither the English nor the French sides exactly come over as covered in glory. From the former camp, we have Lord Talbot, who is cruel to an almost cartoonish degree. On the latter we have King Charles VII (Gründgens), who is cynical to a fault, and has no qualms at all about using Joan when convenient, then discarding her when she isn’t.
This was originally a French play, L’Alouette, written by Jean Anouilh in 1952. Three years later, a translated version was brought to Broadway, where it ran for 226 performances from November 1955 until June 1956. Julie Harris played Joan, and there was quite a star-studded cast behind her, including Boris Karloff as Bishop Cauchon, Christopher Plummer and Theodore Bikel. It was critically acclaimed, Harris winning that year’s Tony Award as Best Leading Actress, and Karloff being nominated as Best Leading Actor. The following February, a TV adaptation was screened in the United, though wasn’t the first or the last such. In November 1956, the BBC screened their version, with Hazel Penwarden as Joan, and a supporting cast including Michael Caine. Additionally, 1958 saw an Australian version, though it seems notable only for having Olivia Newton-John’s father in the cast.
The above refers to the title, and in particular “The Battles”. It is a solid two hours before anything more than handfuls of English and French troops lobbing rocks at each other show up. So if you are here for large-scale spectacle, keep on walking. You will be disappointed. I had a certain idea of what to expect, having seen Rivette’s immediately preceding film La Belle Noiseuse. Admittedly, I saw it largely because I had the hots for Emmanuelle Beart at the time. Otherwise, a four-hour movie, containing lengthy sequences of real-time painting would probably not have been on my radar. But I kinda liked its languid pace (the copious Beart nudity didn’t hurt, let’s be honest!), and so was prepared for things in this to unfold at a similarly leisurely pace.
Just as part 1, 
Pun mot intended, but the reality is, we know very little for sure about Joan of Arc. Not even what she looked like in detail, for there are no surviving portraits of her, dating from when she was alive. The facts about her life are equally as uncertain, because everything about Joan was subject to spin, depending on who was talking, when they were saying it, and what agenda they sought to achieve. Because everybody involved 
I initially intended to review this and its sequel, Jeanme, by Dumont as one entity, for a couple of reasons. They really only work as a single item. This confused the hell out me, because the second film turned up on a streaming service by itself. Five minutes in, I was so confused, I started searching the Internet, only to find I had, in effect, joined a movie already two hours in progress. Also, I suspected I would be hard-pushed to deliver 500 words on 
I liked this considerably better than its predecessor. Part of that was, perhaps, knowing what to expect going in: a minimalist retelling, with occasional musical numbers. Except, this proved rather more than minimalist (though still very restrained), and there was hardly any singing at all. Curse you, Dumont, for confounding my expectations. It begins, much as Jeanette ended: with a lot of standing around in sand-dunes, chatting. However, the cast this time cannot be counted on the fingers of one hand, and there aren’t any staggeringly bad performances to take you out of the movie. You still don’t get any great battles. Instead, these are basically represented by team dressage, two groups of horses and riders, swirling around near each other.
Joan is always a figure who has the potential to be co-opted into other times and locations. Recently, we reviewed 
Yeah, I’ll confess to having Laura Branigan’s eighties hit running through my head on repeat almost the entire movie, even if its lyrics can only be tangentially tied to it. What also struck me is how strong of an influence this was on Luc Besson’s Leon, especially at the beginning. I mean: a criminal gang takes out an entire family in a New York tenement, except for one child, as punishment for the father having tried to steal from them. That survivor takes refuge with a very reluctant neighbour with mob ties, who then has to protect the child as they move about the city. There’s even a scene where one of the gang fires his gun at a nosy resident.
Nineteen years after the original, four-time Oscar nominated director Lumet opted to remake Cassavetes’s movie. Though by some accounts, it was more a case of him wanting to work, rather than being particularly attracted to the project. If the results are anything to go by, he should have stayed at home. For the film was a bomb, and leading lady Stone received a Razzie nomination for her efforts. I wouldn’t have said she was that bad, though she’s clearly not at the same level as Gina Rowlands in the original. It does also address some of what I felt were its’ predecessor’s weaknesses. However, it tones down the central character, and this helps lead to what you’d be hard-pressed to argue is other than an inferior product overall.
While this is not an “official” remake of Gloria, it’s so damn close that I have no problem considering it as one. Writer/director Gaston seems to have… um, a bit of a track record in this area, shall we say. She previously appeared here by directing 
It’s somewhat ironic that John Carpenter was originally supposed to direct this. However, after The Thing tanked at the box-office, he was let go from the project, and replaced by the more commercially “safe” Lester. The irony being that The Thing is now regarded (rightfully) as one of the greatest scifi/horror films of all time, while this is… not. It’s very much a mid-tier Stephen King adaptation, far less well remembered than the similarly themed The Dead Zone, from around the same time. I can understand why: it’s lumbering when it needs to be taut, needlessly coming in a little shy of two hours, and only comes to life at the end, when a pissed-off Drew gets enough XP to learn her Level 3 Fireball spell.
I must admit: While I always found the premise for Stephen King’s 1980 novel Firestarter interesting, I never read the book. 500 small-printed pages are just too much for me. The story itself shares some of its DNA with Carrie, with the difference that this here is about a younger child, not an adolescent, and instead of telekinesis the girl knows pyrokinesis, meaning she can create fire from nowhere and control it. It could be argued that King was just kind of re-using ideas from Carrie, making less of an effort to create something original as he did with other material. Opinions on the story seem to be split. Some think it’s a great novel, of the usual King quality; others think it’s a typical work from the time when King was writing as if he were on the run, and striking while the iron was hot (honestly, I don’t really see he has slowed down so much over the years).
Firestarter is a strange beast with a difficult task: Retaining the core of the original story but not being to close too the orignal movie. Paying tribute to current political correctness, yet not changing the original material too much. For most of the time, they do fine, I’d say. Some changes did catch my eye: the conflict between the parents wasn’t there, as far as I remember, in the original movie. The mother wants Charlene to train so she can control her powers, the father would rather she suppress them, for who knows what may come out of them being released? In contrast, the original spent more time with Dad and daughter in the lab, the evil Rainbird slowly gaining Charlie’s confidence in order to kill her when appropriate. It went more for slow menacing tension – also the approach of King’s novel – while this plays more as a “fugitives-on-the-run” scenario.
Having watched both versions of the film, I followed up by reading the book on which they were based. Despite my general fondness for horror, I haven’t read very much Stephen King: this is only the second novel of his, after Salem’s Lot. First thought: at 576 pages in the mass paperback edition, it’s quite a door-stopper, and you can see the problems in adapting a work of that size into a movie. Inevitably, a lot of the detail and nuance is going to be excised. There’s no doubt, the 1984 version is more faithful; the 2022 adaptation takes the basic concept of a young girl with pyrokinetic powers, on the run from the government with her father, and does its own thing, more or less.