Month: January 2021

The Forty-Year-Old Version

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Radha Blank on a bus

First, the title. It’s called The Forty-Year-Old Version because this autobiographical, documentary-style drama is about the 40-year-old, grown-up version of the kid who wanted to be a writer. Now a struggling actor/writer/director, Radha Blank had once upon a time also turned up on a 30 Under 30 list of hot young talents to watch, so the kid wasn’t deluded. Clearly, something has gone wrong in the intervening years. Instead of having a successful career in the theatre, Radha teaches. They’re nice, funny, feisty kids – the girls want to fight, the boys are obsessed with genitalia. But it’s not what she really wants to do. Radha’s mother, a painter, has recently died and … Read more

Clemency

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Alfre Woodard

We’ve all seen prison dramas – the tough lives of inmates in a heartless system patrolled by brutes, policed by sadists and presided over by a martinet. Clemency isn’t that sort of film. Nor is it film-as-entertainment, be warned, but a grim and sobering look at US prison life from an unusual angle, the warden’s. Opening up with a pre-credits scene that follows an execution on death row, which ends up being a botched, messy and gruelling one, for the man who’s being killed, the people watching and the warden supervising the whole thing, the film proper then concerns itself with the preparations for the execution of another man, Anthony Woods (Aldis Hodge) … Read more

Another Round

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Martin chugs down a beer

Another Round was a big hit in its native Denmark, managing to coax people into cinemas even as the coronavirus pandemic was shooing them away. Partly because it’s got a big Danish star, Mads Mikkelsen, in the lead, back with director Thomas Vinterberg after their big success The Hunt. And partly because it’s about booze and the Danes are big drinkers, particularly teenage Danes. Vinterberg made the film at the prompting of his daughter Ida, who suggested that a story fuelled by the exploits of hard-partying teens might be both interesting and successful. In the end Vinterberg tweaked that idea a bit, to make the film more about boozing middle-aged guys, and then … Read more

Zombi Child

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The girls have a midnight feast

There were zombie movies before George Romero came along and shook the genre up in 1968 with Night of the Living Dead and at first Zombi Child looks like it’s harking back to an older tradition of zombie movie, like 1932’s White Zombie or 1943’s I Walked with a Zombie. We’re in Haiti in 1962, where an opening shot shows us someone assembling something nasty-looking from various bits of pufferfish innards and other voodoo bits and bobs. The resulting powder is then put into a man’s shoes. The man “dies”, is buried, disinterred and in short order – this all taking about five minutes of screen time – is working on a sugar … Read more

Sylvie’s Love

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Robert and Sylvie outside her dad's record store

The remarkable thing about Sylvie’s Love is actually how unremarkable it is in many ways. It’s a white-sliced, white-picket-fence melodrama of a sort that once might have starred a Joan Crawford. Except it’s black rather than white people playing all the parts. That shouldn’t be remarkable, nor should stories about the black middle classes, but it is and Eugene Ashe’s drama knows it’s doing something different in its deliberately old-fashioned, “they don’t make them like this any more” way. Tessa Thompson plays Sylvie, the young woman who works in her daddy’s record store but really wants to get a job in TV. Nnamdi Asomugha is Robert, the tall, dark and handsome saxophonist who … Read more

We Can Be Heroes

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The young stars of We Can Be Heroes

Robert Rodriguez takes the Spy Kids idea for another spin around the block, and crashes on the way. Spy Kids, if you don’t remember, was about kids stepping up when their James Bond-like parents got waylaid. Here the parents are not spies but superheroes, and after they’ve been captured by evil aliens their progeny band together to free them. The kids all have superpowers too. Noodles is stretchy, Slo-Mo can move super quickly, A Capella can sing at pitches so high and low that the laws of physics are bent out of shape. Rewind can turn back time. His sister, Fast Forward… you’re ahead of me. There are more of them, some of … Read more

Blithe Spirit

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Leslie Mann, Dan Stevens, Isla Fisher, Judi Dench

“Hail to thee, blithe Spirit! Bird thou never wert,” run the lines in Shelley’s poem To a Skylark. And though there’s plenty of spirit in 2020’s remake of a 1945 film often considered a classic, this bird resolutely fails to take wing. The basic plot remains the same as the original film (and original play): Charles and Ruth Condomine are a rich couple living in elegant boredom out in the English countryside. He’s a writer struggling with his latest novel. So he gets in a bogus spiritualist, Madame Arcati, to conduct a seance, which waggish Charles will use as background material in his book. The seance goes oddly right, or wrong. When Madame … Read more

Wonder Woman 1984

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Gal Gadot in Wonder Woman gear

And so Wonder Woman 1984. Last time we saw Gal Gadot’s lasso-swinging Amazon she was helping to win the First World War, and now, nearly 70 years on, here she is again in the era of Armani suits and “greed is good” and in a year most closely associated with George Orwell. This is a big, heavy, beast of a film that’s too long, too slow, too dull, and if that is a political message about democracy that writer/director Patty Jenkins is trying to sneak in there, someone should really have told her not to. Gal Gadot remains a wondrous Wonder Woman, though, a flawless paragon of superherodom, and the story gets off … Read more

Why Don’t You Just Die!

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Andrey throws the TV

The trailer does not lie. Why Don’t You Just Die! (Papa, sdokhni in the original Russian) is a camp melodrama awash with blood, gruesomeness, novel ways of hurting people and comic-book cruelty. It’s as if all the horrible things that ever happened to Wile E Coyote were bundled together and then brought to the screen by a Quentin Tarantino or Robert Rodriguez in one of their Grindhouse jaunts. The opening shot: a young man with a fantastically broken nose (Aleksandr Kuznetsov, and that’s his real nose) is waiting outside an apartment with a hammer behind his back. The door after much knocking opens. It is a bullet-headed man (Vitaliy Khaev). Andrey, the young … Read more

First Cow

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King-Lu and Cookie out in the woods

Kelly Reichardt’s films often operate at two levels. At the surface one story plays out, while somewhere to one side, and often as a comment on the first story, something different is going on. First Cow could really be called First Love, since it’s the story of two men who meet in difficult circumstances and then form a bond that lasts until death. What it looks like, though, especially at first, is a western, a story of a cook who’s travelling with hard-bitten fur trappers. They’re all out in the forest and there isn’t enough food. And even if there was, the trappers don’t seem to like what the cook’s been serving. There’s … Read more