Month: March 2021

Apples

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Aris on a child's bike

Apples makes clear that, even in 2021, the Greek Weird Wave continues to roll. A retro-scifi story of a world afflicted by an illness that robs people of their memories, it stars Aris Servetalis as Aris (handy), a man who leaves his home one day and then, suddenly, is sitting on the bus unable to answer basic questions like “where are you going?” or “what is your name?” The prognosis appears to be bad. In this world, once the memory has gone it can’t come back. And so Aris winds up in a medical program designed to give him new memories. He’s given a place to live and is asked to follow a … Read more

100 Years of… The Three Musketeers

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The musketeers and D'Artagnan join swords

You’d have thought that the silent The Three Musketeers from 1921 would be the first film adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’s novel but it wasn’t. Depending on how you count these things it was around the seventh or eighth film version since 1903. It wasn’t even the first of 1921. That honour went to a French serial shot in 14 episodes, Les Trois Mousketaires. But this one, directed by Fred Niblo and starring Douglas Fairbanks Sr, eclipses all the forerunners and most of the successors, largely thanks to the presence of Fairbanks, cusping 40 when he made this but leaping around and larger than life from the moment he hits the screen. This happens … Read more

The Last Vermeer

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Claes Bang and Vicky Krieps

The Last Vermeer is the true story of Han Van Meegeren, art forger extraordinaire, who knocked out old masters by the likes of Frans Hals, Pieter de Hooch and Johannes Vermeer, among others, during the Second World War and even managed to sell a “Vermeer” to Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring for a fortune. Van Meegeren was initially brought to trial in the Netherlands after the War for having sold Göring what was supposed to be a real Vermeer, as a collaborator who had facilitated the expropriation of the cultural property of the Netherlands. But when he eventually admitted that the picture was fake, those charges were dropped. However, because of the skewed logic of … Read more

Teen Spirit

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Violet gets her moment on TV

It doesn’t take much exposure to TV talent shows to realise that success with the voting audience or expert panel isn’t so much about the performance and talent as about the story the contestant tells. Teen Spirit takes that idea, the story, and turns it into a story of its own. In what could almost be a series of filmed inserts for a talent show we meet Violet (Elle Fanning), the bilingual daughter of Polish immigrant single mother Marla (Agnieszka Grochowska). Dad’s gone. Picked on at school. Loves animals. Works hard in a series of dead end jobs. But the girl loves to sing, as we can tell from the glimpse we catch … Read more

Made in Italy

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Liam Neeson and Micheál Richardson

Made in Italy feels like it’s based on one of the books by Peter Mayle, the British advertising executive who tired of the life and lit out for France, where he set about writing lighthearted sun-dredged reports on his new life. A Year in Provence was the first and it sold very well. That became a TV series of the same name, starring John Thaw and Lindsay Duncan as the expatriate couple making a new go of it, and another Mayle book, A Good Year, later became a Ridley Scott film starring Russell Crowe as a Brit in Provence learning to be a bit less of a bull at a gate about life. … Read more

Blue Story

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Stephen Odubola and Micheal Ward

Scrappy but powerful, Blue Story is also known as the film that got briefly banned by some UK cinema chains, because some people going to see it were arriving armed to the teeth. “Blue Story, a violent gangster movie, made by the BBC,” is how one British newspaper, never happier than when playing the race card and trashing the “woke” BBC, described the film in its reporting on the violent skirmishes at Star City, Birmingham, when the film opened. What was doubly unfortunate, from the film’s perspective, is that the other film showing that day was Frozen II, so the kids lining up to see that got a lot more than they bargained … Read more

The Kingmaker

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Imelda Marcos at home

Lauren Greenfield’s new documentary is called The Kingmaker but it looks at first glance like nothing more than a film about a woman whose days in the sun are long behind her. Greenfield you may remember as the director of The Queen of Versailles, a film about a trophy wife of a very rarefied sort. Imelda Marcos, subject of The Kingmaker, you might remember as another trophy wife, of Philippines dictator Ferdinand Marcos. She of 3,000 pairs of shoes. Watching it I was reminded of Errol Morris’s 2013 documentary about Donald Rumsfeld, The Unknown Known, in which Morris managed to lay not a single glove on the old fox, who had absolutely no … Read more

Made in Hong Kong

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Sam Lee as Moon

Finished in time for the handover of Hong Kong from the British to the Chinese in 1997, restored in 2017 as yet more waves of protest against that regime convulsed its streets, Made in Hong Kong is as much a celebration of the city’s energy as it is the guts-or-glory story of one of its residents. Director Fruit Chan builds out from its hero and in from its frequent cityscapes, the total effect being a portrait in the round of a time and a place. The human focus is Sam Lee, as a gangster called Mid Autumn Moon who is so low-level that his whole gangster status is moot. With his wiry physique … Read more

Boss Level

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Roy puts an opponent to the sword

For those days when you just want something entertaining – Boss Level, a new Joe Carnhan movie that gives us the familiar Carnahan formula, action plus buffoonery, delivered with a deadpan rictus by a new arrival in geri-action heroics – Frank Grillo. Grillo plays Roy Pulver, a guy who wakes up every day to the same scenario – a “machete wielding asshole” trying to kill him, followed by an encounter with a helicopter gunship, followed by a deadly explosion and a fall from a high window, after which he’s chased down city streets in fast cars by gun-toting bad guys determined to kill him. That’s if they haven’t already killed him. Because Pulver has lived … Read more

The Mauritanian

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Tahar Rahim and Jodie Foster

The man at the centre of The Mauritanian, Mohamedou Ould Slahi, is a real person. Wikipedia spells his last name Salahi but its facts otherwise agree pretty closely with Kevin Macdonald’s film – picked up in Mauritania, extraordinary rendition to Guantanamo Bay, where he was held for years, suspected of being Al Qaeda’s chief recruiter. Was he? Macdonald earned his stripes making documentaries and went big time with Touching the Void. Since then he’s had his biggest successes with films cleaving close to the factual (The Last King of Scotland, about Uganda tyrant Idi Amin), while the more overtly fictional The Eagle (Roman legions in Scotland) and Black Sea (submarine jeopardy) caused less … Read more