Month: May 2021

Rocks

by
Rocks and her friends

Rocks is the director Sarah Gavron’s best fiction feature to date, beating Brick Lane and Suffragette to top honours thanks to outstandingly fresh performances from a cast of actors who deserve all the praise that’s been heaped on them. It’s a simple and fairly familiar story. Rocks (Bukky Bakray) is a London inner-city kid, feisty and formidable, fast of mouth, quick of wit, older in attitude than her 13 years. One day her mother simply disappears from the council block she shares with Rocks and much younger brother Emmanuel (D’angelou Osei Kissiedu), leaving behind a note saying she’s gone off somewhere to “clear my head” plus a bit of money intended to tide … Read more

Finding Jack Charlton

by
Jack Charlton

The title Finding Jack Charlton begs the question: was Jack Charlton lost? The answer, in a way, is yes. He died in July 2020 but at the time this documentary was being made (in 2019) Charlton was suffering from dementia (the film is made in association with Ireland’s Alzheimer’s Society) and was lost to everyone around him, trapped inside a miserable world of forgetting. His condition is no crueller than when dementia strikes anyone else, but perhaps it is more pointed, because Charlton was one of those big, ebullient footballing characters, quick of wit, fiery, charming, like Brian Clough the sort of person who commands an interest even from people who aren’t much … Read more

Zack Snyder’s Justice League

by
Justice League group portrait

The day I sat down to watch Zack Snyder’s Justice League, the death of Jim Steinman, songwriter for Meat Loaf, among many others, had just been announced. And it occurred to me about halfway through watching that this epic is a case of same/same: a big, loud, glorious, ever-crescendoing Bat Out of Hell of a movie. Snyder himself pops up before the action gets going, to say a big thank you to the fans who hash-tagged his version of the movie into existence with a #ReleaseTheSnyderCut campaign. They were disappointed with the original 2017 version, which, having fought a guerrilla campaign against the Warner Bros suits, Snyder finally abandoned after his daughter died. … Read more

Danny. Legend. God.

by
Danny with Graeco-Roman bust of himself

Danny. Legend. God. it’s called, though Danny. Asshole. Cock. might have been more appropriate, this being the portrait of a man of quite staggering front, bravado, bumptiousness, call it what you will, a legend in his own lunchtime aiming at the big time from his base in Bulgaria. Danny. Quite exactly who he is, where he comes from or what he does we never quite find out. A gangster/businessman/official of some sort, being followed by a documentary team who are making a film about money-laundering, though Danny doesn’t really want to talk about that. Instead he buttonholes the entire crew – interviewer Susan (Kate Nichols), soundman Jaime (James Ryan Babson) and the cameraman … Read more

The Courier

by
Wynne with Dickie Franks and Emily Donovan

A familiar and enjoyable spy movie of the old school, The Courier went by the name Ironbark on its first screenings. The new title suits it better. Why that is, and whether the film should be so familiar and enjoyable is the question. It’s the true story of a middle-class amateur, Greville Wynne, deployed on a no-need-to-know basis by MI6 and the CIA to ferry messages from a Soviet agent back to the West at the height of the Cold War. Together, so the story goes, Wynne and agent Oleg Penkovsky saved the world from destruction as the Cuban Missile Crisis threatened to unleash World War III. “I’m just a salesman,” says Wynne … Read more

Motherless Brooklyn

by
Lionel aka Brooklyn in a stakeout

Motherless Brooklyn is the first film Ed Norton has directed since 2000’s Keeping the Faith. Oddly, considering Norton is a child of Episcopalians, that also had a connection to Catholicism – a rabbi and a priest fall for the same woman, boom boom. Here the link is the Catholic orphanage where Norton’s Lionel Essrog and his buds grew up, before being rescued by a kindly benefactor (Bruce Willis), who put them all to work in his detective agency. “Brooklyn” is what Frank (Willis) calls the motherless Lionel but let’s not worry too much about Frank since he dies in the first few minutes, providing the kicking-off point for a whodunit set on mean … Read more

My Thoughts Are Silent

by
Vadim and his mother in a pool

My Thoughts Are Silent (Moyi dumky tykhi, in the original Ukrainian) is one of a small clutch of films about or featuring a sound recordist, sitting alongside the likes of Silence (from Ireland), Upstream Color (USA) and Berberian Sound Studio (UK). All are odd and left-field in different ways, with My Thoughts Are Silent the most deliberately comedic. Which is not quite the same thing as “funny” though it does have its moments. There’s a black and white prologue before the film proper gets going, set in Hungary in 1526, where some priest is trying to flog a “holy relic” to two priests. “A foreskin?” asks one of the clerics hopefully. It turns … Read more

The Golden Glove

by
Fritz outside the Golden Glove

Should a serial killer movie sympathise with its killer? The Golden Glove (Der Goldene Handschuh) comes perilously close to going all-in with real-life killer Fritz Honka (Jonas Dassler), who killed four women in Hamburg between 1970 and 1974 and then hid their body parts in his attic. Grim, seedy, sleazy, disgusting, vile, the negative adjectives have piled up in discussions about this undoubtedly brilliantly made movie. I’d go for “pitiless” or “cosmically ironic”. More verbosely, it’s a cool exercise in the manipulation of the human tendency to imprint (like a duckling for the first “mamma” object it sees on hatching) suggesting the omnivorous writer/director Fatih Akin has been watching Park Chan-wook’s Vengeance trilogy … Read more

His House

by
Rial screaming

Let’s do a refugee drama, which no one wants to watch, as a haunted house movie, which everyone does. That’s the thinking behind His House, a canny mix of genres from writer/director Remi Weekes in his feature debut, which adds a further layer of originality by adding all sorts of weird African supernatural juju to the mix. This clever and atmospheric amalgam kicks off with a pair of refugees from the war in South Sudan being shown a house on a housing estate in shithole Britain. It’s loads better than the detention centre and so Bol (Sope Dirisu) and his wife Rial (Wunmi Mosaku) cannot believe their luck. They move straight in. Of … Read more

The 400 Blows

by
Jean-Pierre Léaud as Antoine

The 400 Blows is a monster classic of the French New Wave with a meaningless title, a literal translation of the original French Les 400 cents coups. “Raising hell” would be a more idiomatic way of putting it and the original US subtitler even suggested Wild Oats. But the distributor preferred to stick with the literal and more enigmatic (in English anyway) translation. The Wild Oats being sown, the Hell being raised, the 400 Blows being struck are by the central character, Antoine (Jean-Pierre Léaud) modelled on director/writer François Truffaut himself, a kid kicking against the pricks at home, at school, getting into trouble with the law, playing hooky to go to the … Read more