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Vermiglio
Done a bit faster and with less attention to detail, Vermiglio would be a soap opera. Its story is pure soap – secret assignation, love, betrayal, jealousy, closely guarded secrets and the warm embrace/stultifying smother of the family environment. Maura Delpero’s film is set in northern Italy in 1944 where a deserter from the army – sensing war is over – is hiding out with a large family up in their barn on the hill. He falls for one of the daughters, and she for him, and in the natural scheme of things they get close. Then… disaster. And spoilers. Pietro (Giuseppe De Domenico), a dark and handsome Sicilian, woos Lucia (Martina Scrinzi), though he … Read more
Capricorn One
According to conspiracy theorists, Kubrick shot the Moon landings. Peter Hyams is in some respects a better candidate. His Capricorn One is all about a faked journey into space, and is undoubtedly the inspiration behind many of the whisperings about Nasa making the whole thing up. Why does Kubrick get name-checked so much more often than Hyams then? Probably because Kubrick is a better film-maker, even though the space sections of his 2001: A Space Odyssey look far more obviously bogus than Hyams’s later mission-to-Mars movie. 1977’s Capricorn One is also a bit of a mess, whereas 2001, for all the messing around, is not. Hyams does his best work early on and … Read more
In the Summers
This tricky but not tricksy feature debut for writer/director Alessandra Lacorazza Samudio is a lightly dramatised account of the summers spent with her sister visiting her dad in New Mexico. Tricky because it’s a film about a lack rather than a presence, a failure to connect on both sides – though both dad and the kids do score points for trying. Done sometimes as snapshots, at other times as more extended scenes from a life, the story is told through the eyes of the two sisters who arrive in Las Cruces every year, to stay with dad while their mother back home in California – never seen or heard – does whatever footloose … Read more
Play Dirty
“Life is goddam black and I photograph life.” Andre De Toth’s thumbnail manifesto is perfectly illustrated by Play Dirty, his last film and one of his ugliest. Critics hated it, though you sense it was the nihilism of the movie they really had an issue with rather than the various issues they cited. War is hell and it turns men into beasts, that’s the message here. It is in essence The Dirty Dozen but dirtier, a not-so-playful Second World War adventure in the sands of North Africa, where a prissy cravat-wearing Brit, played by Michael Caine, is seconded by a cynical top brass (who expect everyone to die) to lead a crack unit … Read more
Despicable Me 4
Are you still here? That’s how I approached Despicable Me 4, an intellectual property that had done all its emotional work already in the first movie – how super-super villain Gru became a decent sort – but somehow miraculously re-purposed itself and sailed on to franchise glory. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this fourth iteration is that everyone involved seems to still give a stuff. The story is zippy, the voice cast is committed, the animation is lively and colourful, it has a good soundtrack. It’s busy, too busy really, but it’s still pulling out the stops, being inventive when it could just ride along on its own coat tails. You could start … Read more
100 Years of… The Plastic Age
There was barely any plastic around in 1925 when The Plastic Age debuted. “Plastic” in this context has its original sense of something easily moulded – “rendering the material more plastic”, my dictionary offers as an example. That “material” in this case is a young man and his “Age” is the reason he’s so biddable, labile, impressionable, easily influenced – see your thesaurus for more synonyms. Donald Keith plays the dude, Hugh, a young man off to college where, his parents hope, he’ll keep the family end up and fulfil himself as a sportsman of track and field (no one at this college seems to do any studying). But instead of knuckling down … Read more
Fancy Dance
Lily Gladstone shot Fancy Dance in breaks in the filming of Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon. His film might be the reason why she got the gig on the fiction debut of documentarian Erica Tremblay. Or maybe not. Either way, Gladstone repays Tremblay’s compliment with a performance every bit as eye-catching as the one she gave for Mr S. They’re not dissimilar in many ways – stoic is probably the word to describe them. What also connects the two films up is that they’re both set in the world of the Native American, and neither is going for the sentimental easy goal. There the similarities don’t exactly cease so much as … Read more
The Day of the Jackal
The Day of the Jackal would probably appeal to the members of a Facebook group called the Dull Men’s Club – recent topics include fuel efficiency while driving, insulating old buildings and dealing with nail fungus. The Dull Men’s Club (a Dull Men’s and Women’s Club also exists) loves detail, procedure, process, how things work and why they sometimes don’t. The Day of the Jackal is the procedural film with knobs on. It came out in 1973 and was made by Fred Zinnemann, an Austrian-born American director based in London who managed to get studio sign-off on his adaptation of Frederick Forsyth’s novel about an assassination attempt on the life of General de Gaulle, … Read more
Janet Planet
Janet Planet is interesting on all sorts of levels but the title is a good place to start. Because the film is really concerned with Lacy, a girl of about 11 who is withdrawn and self-absorbed, friendless and a bit weird but sweet, smart and nice with it. Why she has no friends seems like a mystery and by the end of the film it remains largely unanswered, but writer/director Annie Baker gives us clues – the big one being Janet, the planetary object around which Lacy orbits, her mother. This is Baker’s first film, and the debut also of Zoe Ziegler, who plays Lacy, but most of the rest of the cast … Read more
100 Years of… The Eagle
Rudolph Valentino made The Eagle in 1925 and while it wasn’t a smash along the lines of Blood and Sand or The Sheik, it did better than his previous four films – it was a comeback of sorts, and came not long before Valentino was whisked to the place from which no comeback is possible, after contracting peritonitis and dying. Death is on the cards in The Eagle too, an adaptation of a Pushkin story about a young hussar who is spotted by the libidinous Czarina Catherine II and offered a place in her bed. But young, handsome and proud Vladimir Doubrovsky (the name is spelt a number of ways on screen) doesn’t … Read more
Femme
Femme has a really powerful premise – a black drag artist in full cross-dressed glory is beaten up one night by a white tattooed thug for being a “faggot”, then months later happens upon the same guy in, of all places, a gay sauna. The angry closeted homophobe clearly doesn’t recognise the meek black guy out of costume and the two of them get into a strange sort of relationship – no-strings, ask-no-questions sex. What’s going on here? Is the black guy a masochist who’s taking his liking for a bit of rough to the next level? Is he seeking revenge and keeping his powder dry? Or is it physical attraction pure and … Read more
Two or Three Things I Know About Her
It’s often said that Jean-Luc Godard’s Two or Three Things I Know About Her (2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle) has no narrative throughline, that it’s freeform, experimental, avant-garde and so on. This is both true and not true. There is a story, though Godard does his best to hide it, of a young Parisian woman, Juliette (Marina Vlady), who intersperses her roles as wife and mother with a bit of prostitution on the side. This she does, she explains in voiceover, at the request of her husband, who she met while working as a prostitute, and who suggested she go back on the game as a way of making a … Read more
