Month: November 2020

Charm City Kings

by
Lamont, Mouse and Sweartagawd

Charm City Kings begins and ends with real-life footage of young men doing outrageous things on dirt bikes and the like – wheelies down the road, mostly, but wheelies done at such speed and with such a degree of virtuosity that you want to see more. Not unnaturally, that’s what I thought I was getting, a film about guys who do wheelies on bikes. And I still thought I was getting that as I was introduced to Mouse (Jahi Di’Allo Winston), Sweartagawd (Kezii Curtis) and Lamont (Donielle Tremaine Hansley), three 14-year-old from the Baltimore (aka Charm City) hood who want to run – and ride – with the big boys. And I continued … Read more

Nocturne

by
Vivian and Juliet

Nocturne is a story about two sisters. Twins. Both students at an arts academy. Vivian (Madison Iseman) is off to prestigious Juilliard soon; Juliet (Sydney Sweeney) isn’t. Vivian has a hot boyfriend; Juliet doesn’t. Vivian plays tricksy pieces by the likes of Saint Saëns; Juliet sticks with safe dependable Mozart. Vivian is feisty and popular; Juliet is moody and a loner. Both seem reasonably accepting of their lot, until a fellow student commits suicide (we see her leaping from an upper floor in a pre-credits sequence), and Juliet comes into possession of a book once owned by the dead student, a book full of spooky satanic drawings with a medieval flavour. Duh, duh, … Read more

Godard Mon Amour aka Redoubtable

by
Louis Garrel and Stacy Martin

Le Redoutable aka Redoubtable aka Godard Mon Amour is another exercise in period spoofing for Michel Hazanavicius, the French film-maker who made his name with pastiches – notably winning an Oscar for The Artist, the faux silent movie having followed two 007 spoofs, the OSS 117 movies. In all three a fictional character was held up for mild ridicule while Hazanavicius and his team sweated the small stuff, getting thousands of details just so in an attempt to conjure a world back into existence. As with the OSS films the period this time is again the 1960s but this time the central figure isn’t fictional, it’s director Jean-Luc Godard, the hippest man in … Read more

Lost Transmissions

by
Juno Temple and Simon Pegg lying in the snow

Affable, blokeish, pint-in-a-pub, kickaround-in-the-park Simon Pegg. Even when he was playing Scotty in Star Trek he was still likeable Simon Pegg. From talking to someone who worked with him on one of the “Cornetto Trilogy” (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, The World’s End), he is actually like that in real life. What you see is what you get – smart, geeky, funny, relatable. It comes as a shock to see him acting. In Lost Transmissions he’s a nervy record producer called Theo, life and soul of the party, a survivor of some 1990s band who now lives with his fellow Brit expats out in LA – they’ve made it. Theo is such … Read more

Black Box

by
Phylicia Rashad and Mamoudou Athie

There are exceptions, but it used to be the case that apart from blacksploitation, or movies made by and for specific black audiences, you didn’t used to see an awful lot of people of colour in genre movies – like rom-coms or sci-fi, action or horror – except, perhaps, as the guy who dies first. That has been changing for some time, but Get Out and Hamilton seemed to mark a watershed, the arrival of “post-white America” on screen. A black man isn’t a black man, he’s just a man. Black Box, title be damned, sits comfortably in that niche. A knotty identity thriller starring the subtly persuasive Mamoudou Athie as Nolan, a photographer … Read more

The Wolf of Snow Hollow

by
Riki Lindhome, Robert Forster, Jim Cummings, Demetrius Daniels

Young couple PJ and Brianne check in to a holiday cabin. They’re in love. He’s intending to propose later that evening. But before that, they go out to dinner, PJ gets on the wrong side of some local rednecks and things almost get physical. Back at the cabin, while PJ showers, Brianne is attacked and dismembered by a person or thing unknown. When the cops show up, there are body parts everywhere and Brianne’s vagina is missing. That gruesome detail is emblematic of a film otherwise made strictly to a formula, the twist added by writer/director/star Jim Cummings lifting everything onto another plane. This sort of thing used to happen from time to … Read more

Comrade Drakulich

by
Maria Magyar meets the vampire

Can the might of the communist system in 1960s Hungary defeat an Undead vampire? Comrade Drakulich (aka Drakulics Elvtárs) has a bit of fun finding out. Mária Magyar (Lili Walters) is a pretty, junior-level Hungarian spy detailed to escort hero of the worldwide communist revolution Béla Fábián (Zsolt Nagy) on a tour of his mother country. The idea is to help raise the profile of a countrywide blood drive in aid of the wounded in Vietnam (the North) using the internationally famous veteran as the face of the campaign. Fábián’s old comrades from the Second World War are now on the verge of being doddering old men but strangely enough he’s still a … Read more

The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant

by
Petra on her shagpile carpet

Though he had 40+ films to his name when he died in 1982 aged 37, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s roots lay in the theatre and it often showed. They’re clearly visible in The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, a film playing out on one set where a handful of actors perform in a theatrical “back of the room” style. The action, what little of it there is, takes place in and around the bed of Petra von Kant (Margit Carstensen), a massively entitled fashion designer attended by an entirely silent aide, Marlene (Irm Hermann). As Marlene brings coffee, cake, champagne, opens doors to let people in and out, types letters and between times … Read more

The Social Dilemma

by
Tristan Harris (left) checks his phone

Somewhere between the greenlighting of the 2013 Owen Wilson/Vince Vaughn comedy The Internship – about two washed-up Generation Xers trying to make a go of it at Google – the attitude towards the tech giants changed. Intended as a genial comedy – and part financed by Google – it went into production skipping along on the trade winds of the zeitgeist but by the time it hit the screens the mood had shifted, the winds had veered. The end result looked propagandistic and borderline scary. That shift is what The Social Dilemma is about, a talking-heads documentary bringing into the mainstream misgivings by former industry lynchpins about the ways in which the tech giants … Read more

Ema

by
Mariana Di Girólamo

The first film I saw of Pablo Larraín’s was 2008’s Tony Manero, which was about a man whose passion in life was posing as John Travolta’s character, Tony Manero, out of Saturday Night Fever. Larraín’s interest in people pretending to be something they’re not continues in Ema, which also happens to be a film pretending to be something it’s not. Even without the late gotcha moment when both Ema and the film are upended, what we have here is a mix of character study, formal experiment and genre pastiche, served up in two separate visual flavours by DP Sergio Armstrong, his usual gauzy, alienated lighting style punctuated by moments of boiling vital colour. … Read more