C&C 74: SIFF 2025 Wrap-Up, Part Two
Vintage 3-D noir and dramas from around the globe
Here’s part one of my SIFF coverage, surveying documentaries.
My personal highlight of the 2025 Seattle International Film Festival was not some new, obscure discovery but a curio over seventy years old. As part of its archival program, the festival screened a recent restoration of The Glass Web (1953), one of the handful of noir films shot using the 3-D process. I appreciated the visual gimmickry, but the nifty murder plot provided all the fireworks I required.
John Forsythe stars as Don Newell, who cranks out scripts for the reality TV forerunner Crime of the Week. His eye wandered from his typewriter long enough for him to have had a dalliance with ambitious actress Paula Rainer (Kathleen Hughes). A chastened Don has returned to his wife, but Paula blackmails him. Don drains his kids’ accounts at the credit union and arrives at Paula’s pad to pony up—only to find her dead. He’s scrambling to hide his history with the victim when Henry Hayes (Edward G. Robinson), the wily ex-crime reporter turned researcher who has his eye on Don’s job, convinces the show’s producers that their season finale should tackle the Rainer case.
The Glass Web is no masterpiece, just a lot of nasty fun. It helps to be in the hands of Jack Arnold, the Spielberg of early stereoscopic cinema, who directed four 3-D features in the 1950s including Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954). Here he uses the technology mainly to show depth of field, most effectively in scenes set in the TV studio complex. It’s ironic that the movie gives us a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the nascent days of television considering that 3-D was developed to coax audiences away from the small screen and into theaters. There’s a begrudging sequence packed with “comin’ at ya!” gags, Don wandering the streets bemoaning his fate as various objects tumble toward the camera. The restored 3-D looks terrific. Kathleen Hughes, a formidable femme fatale, was cast on the strength of her brief appearance in It Came from Outer Space (1953), another of Arnold’s 3-D features. This led Universal to crown her “Miss 3-D 1953.” The day after SIFF’s screening of The Glass Web, Hughes died at age 96. My Film Noir Foundation colleague Alan K. Rode wrote a reminiscence of the actress for Variety.
My favorite SIFF movie of the past decade is The Guilty (2018). In this Danish drama, a compromised cop busted down to responding to 911 calls seizes on a communication from a woman in distress as a bid at redemption. The action never leaves the call center but remains relentless; Gustav Möller deservedly won the festival’s Golden Space Needle Award for Best Director that year. The film was remade, with Antoine Fuqua (Training Day) steering Jake Gyllenhaal through a script by True Detective’s Nic Pizzolatto, but I haven’t seen it. Möller’s original left that deep a mark.
Möller returns to SIFF with his follow-up feature. Sons (Denmark/Sweden, 2024) serves up more tension in tight quarters, this time in prison. Guard Eva Hansen (Sidse Babett Knudsen, star of the international hit TV series Borgen) is the mother hen of her cell block, brooking no nonsense even as she asks after each inmate’s sleep and teaches her charges deep breathing. When she spies Mikkel (Sebastian Bull) being processed into the high-security wing, she arranges a transfer, because years ago the new prisoner murdered her son. She sets out to get revenge, her matronly qualities leading everyone to underestimate her except the target of her aggression; soon, they’re locked in a clandestine battle of wills. Their duel builds toward a catharsis that unfortunately never comes. Möller may intend for it to be thwarted, suggesting that both characters are imprisoned by choices made long before they wound up behind bars, but the ending still feels unresolved. Two sterling lead performances carry audiences past that disappointment and several logical inconsistencies. Eva has dialed her grief down so low that it’s startling whenever Knudsen unleashes it, and while Bull may resemble a proto-Mads Mikkelsen, the quicksilver play of emotions over a face that is brutish one second and childlike the next calls to mind early turns by Joaquin Phoenix.
When you cowrite a series of mysteries featuring Edith Head as a detective, you are obligated to see any movie set in a costume shop. Diamonds (Italy, 2024) primarily plays out at a theatrical atelier in 1974 Rome run by two sisters. When an Oscar-winning costume designer asks them to take on the wardrobe for the stars of an epic period film, the more hard-driving of the siblings (Luisa Ranieri) pushes to do the clothes for the entire company. Naturally, all the women in her employ, played by an ensemble of over a dozen of Italy’s top actresses, put their lives on hold, because … art. Diamonds is a groaning buffet, director/cowriter Ferzan Özpetek tossing in traumas—Political unrest! Family tragedy! Domestic violence!—like fistfuls of spice into a sauce, compressing a telenovela’s worth of plot into 135 minutes punctuated with not one but two breaks for the cast to burst into song. Plus there’s a bizarre meta framing device with Özpetek first assembling his leading ladies for a family meal to propose the film, then hosting a script reading that turns into a conversation about death, and finally wandering the now-empty sets recalling favorite bits of dialogue. Diamonds was a smash hit in its native land, and it’s easy to understand why. Flashy and superficial, the damned thing keeps moving, simply because it has to. And it’s a bonanza of dazzling costumes, particularly the chic outfits worn by Ranieri. It’s not a good movie. It would be a better one with a pitcher of negronis on hand.
Bitter Gold (Chile/Mexico/Uruguay/Germany, 2024) is exactly the kind of film one hopes to stumble on at a festival, unheralded, unpretentious, and riveting. Fittingly, it’s about searching for the title element. 16-year-old Carola (Katalina Sánchez) leads a hardscrabble existence with her father Pacífico (Francisco Melo) in the deserts of northern Chile, running a wildcat copper mine. Every morning, they ferry their surly crew into the barren wastes, Carola monitoring expenses and cooking for the team. When Pacífico is critically injured following an ambush by a drunken employee, Carola takes his place. She pretends her father is away on business, scrambling to keep the threadbare operation afloat and fending off rivals who sense an opportunity in Pacífico’s absence. There are shades of neo-noir and the western in this thriller, its tight script revealing so much by implication. Director Juan Francisco Olea heightens the suspense with lingering shots of the desolate, almost-alien landscape to emphasize how isolated the characters are; no one is coming to their rescue. Anchoring it all is Sánchez’s remarkable performance. Her fierce and resourceful Carola is bluffing almost every second she’s onscreen, even in scenes with her father when she’s too frightened to admit how thinly she’s been stretched—and how bad he looks. “Wherever there’s gold, there’s always a somewhat bitter taste,” Pacífico tells her as a piece of practical mining advice. Turns out it’s applicable everywhere.
SIFF announced this year’s award winners on Sunday, and thirty films are available via streaming through June 1.