Month: March 2021

Lapsis

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Anna and Ray in a car

Sci-fi costs money. All those sets, all that tech. But there’s an honourable tradition of good lo-fi sci-fi that Lapsis fits into neatly. Films like The Signal, Attack the Block, Timecrimes and Monsters are only low budget in movie terms. Others (Skeletons, Thale) somehow get made for the sort of money most people could lose and not notice. All marked are with the ingenuity that springs from necessity. The ingenious, inspired leap in Lapsis is to use tech that is genuinely rickety and old school – everything looks 1990s, from 8-bit computer screens to boxy hardware – and make its star a guy who is old school himself. Even his name is old … Read more

Nomadland

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Fern has a cigarette

In January 2011 the US Gypsum plant in Empire, Nevada, shut down. By July of the same year the town’s zip code had been discontinued. Nomadland makes personal a phenomenon that’s been going on for decades but has accelerated since the big crash of 2008. Of displaced older blue-collar workers who lose their homes and jobs and take to the road, travelling around the US working at any job they can, living out of cars, vans and recreational vehicles, a new nomad class. The film is based on the 2018 book by Jessica Bruder, an extended piece of non-fiction reporting detailing the phenomenon, and stars Frances McDormand as Fern – the only person … Read more

Raya and the Last Dragon

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Raya and Sisu

Remember when Disney princesses just lay about in glass cases waiting to be kissed? Raya and the Last Dragon gives us the latest iteration of the new style of Disney female, joining Mulan, Merida (from Brave) and Moana in a kick-butty world of smarts where any obvious interest in looking glasses or clothes is deeply suspect. Disney love the ™ symbol but as I write Raya has not yet been made a part of the Princess Line™. She’s up there with the best of them so it can only be a matter of time. Her film has a driving story with emotional depth, a good voice cast, doesn’t overdo the cutes and there … Read more

The Intruder

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Annie and Scott look scared

The Intruder examines, in the sort of lurid, semi-deranged way you’d expect from a horror movie, something that’s actually rather subtle. How a house becomes a home. How any prospective buyer, looking around someone else’s home with a view to purchasing it, is an intruder. And how the seller, once the deal is complete, still has some residual emotional hold over the property. It might be the new buyer’s house – the legal documents say so – but in some sense it’s still the old owner’s home, especially if they lived there for decades. Nice young marrieds Scott (Michael Ealy) and Annie (Meagan Good) have done well in their careers and fancy moving … Read more

After Midnight

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Hank on the sofa

A few years ago Jeremy Gardner wrote, directed and co-starred in The Battery, a criminally underrated zombie movie that just had two guys in it… and a horde of zombies. It examined a relationship that had gone on too long – two guys who’d played together in a baseball team and who were then thrown into too-close proximity by an apocalypse – and watched as its final stages played out… with a horde of zombies. Gardner, now co-directing with The Battery’s producer and cinematographer Christian Stella, pulls off something similar with After Midnight. No zombies this time, just a mystery monster lurking outside and a relationship going wrong inside. Gardner is again in a lead … Read more

To the Ends of the Earth

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Yoko with a portable camera

The Japanese writer/director Kiyoshi Kurosawa (no relation to Akira) first made his name with horror movies, but even though he’s moved away from the genre at a superficial level, there’s often something dark lurking beneath what often looks like a bright and clean surface. Exhibit A: To the Ends of the Earth. It looks like a film about a young female Japanese TV reporter and her all-male crew making a travelogue in Uzbekistan. Yoko (Atsuko Maeda) has been hired because she’s pretty and professional and able to muster up that peculiar level of boggle-eyed enthusiasm for her assignment that Japanese TV requires. On-camera she’s all wild gesticulation, her voice squeaking away at an … Read more

100 Years of… The Sheikh

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Rudolph Valentino as the Sheikh

Rudolph Valentino had two big films in 1921. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, by far the biggest grossing film of the year, was the one that made him a star. But The Sheikh was even more important. It made Valentino so famous that we still talk of him today, long after the auras of fellow stars like Norma Talmadge and Wallace Reid have faded. The Four Horsemen gave Valentino the “Latin lover” tag but The Sheikh made it stick, something that Valentino – striving to have a varied career – struggled against before bowing to the inevitable in 1926 with Son of the Sheikh. In an intense but short time at the … Read more

Judas and the Black Messiah

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Daniel Kaluuya as Fred Hampton

Part history lesson, part undercover thriller, Judas and the Black Messiah takes it as read that the audience knows the bare-bones facts about the Black Panther movement. And just in case they don’t, there are three powerful performers in key roles to help bounce over the gaps. These are the shapeshifting Daniel Kaluuya as Black Panther “Chairman” Fred Hampton, dead at 21, killed while asleep in nothing less than a state assassination. LaKeith Stanfield as Bill O’Neal, the mole who fed information about the Panthers to the police. And Jesse Plemons as Roy Mitchell, the FBI handler running O’Neal. We meet O’Neal before we meet the Panthers – he’s an audacious car thief … Read more

The Dig

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Basil on the sofa, Mrs Pretty kneeling on the floor

The Dig re-imagines the events around a discovery so fabulous it needs no re-imagining – the excavation of the Sutton Hoo hoard. First unearthed in the 1930s, and originally thought to be Viking, the hoard turned out to be much older, Anglo Saxon, and eventually yielded up remarkable treasures made of gold, plus examples of everyday household objects that rewrote our understanding of the time, and perhaps most eye-catching of all, a 6th-century ship, buried in a mound as a funeral barque for its owner. You don’t actually learn an awful lot about the actual treasures of Sutton Hoo in The Dig, though the skeletal frame of the part-excavated ship acts as a visual … Read more

Greenland

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The family driving to save their lives

Gerard Butler is a fine actor capable of great nuance, a line usually guaranteed to get a laugh. No, but he is. It’s just that he’s chosen the action-guy route in films like the (Olympus, London, Angel) Has Fallen series rather than the sensitive thespian path he could have taken after 2004’s Frankie (plenty of nuanced Butler there). Greenland gives us a lot of one sort of Butler and enough of the other to suggest that the actor is weighing up a return to actual acting, rather than continuing exclusively to pull Action Man poses. Because Greenland is a movie with nuance and some psychological depth wrapped up in a very familiar disaster … Read more