Month: June 2021

Pather Panchali

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Subir Banerjee as Apu

One of the breakout hits of world cinema – a term that didn’t yet exist – Pather Panchali came seemingly from nowhere in 1955 and swept all before it. It remains a highly regarded film to this day, still featuring on Sight and Sound’s prestigious once-a-decade 100 Greatest Films of All Time list. In other words it’s one of those films you really ought to have seen if you’re going to hold your held high in the world of film buffery. It’s part of director Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy, along with Aparajito (1956) and The World of Apu (1959), the three films forming a Bildungsroman slab of biographical drama centred on the child … Read more

Miss Juneteenth

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Nicole Beharie in Miss Juneteenth crown

Around about the time Miss Juneteenth came out in 2020, President Donald Trump was announcing that he was going to have a rally in Tulsa on Juneteenth Day (19 June) – the day commemorating the end of slavery. In the end Trump, for whatever reason, moved the rally to the following day. By the following year, President Biden had made the day a national holiday – Juneteenth Day won out… twice. Given its title, you might expect Miss Juneteenth to be a film about slavery or injustice or civil rights, but actually, superficially at least, it’s about a former beauty queen hoping her daughter will follow in her footsteps and become Miss Juneteenth in … Read more

Waiting for the Barbarians

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Colonel Joll and the Magistrate

It’s a Sondheimian title, Waiting for the Barbarians – as in, “don’t worry, they’re here” – a story about the white man’s civilising mission on some distant frontier and how it gives licence to people whose instincts are far from civilised. The uniforms are deliberately non-specific but for the sake of argument we might as well say it’s the British who are in the spotlight, especially as Brit Mark Rylance is the star. He’s also almost the entire focus of a film about a kindly magistrate way out in the midst of a sandy nowhere whose humanist tendencies are crushed underfoot by the arrival of one badass after another. Enter Johnny Depp, in … Read more

Divorce Italian Style

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The count imagines burying his wife in sand

Who remembers 1961’s Divorce Italian Style (Divorzio all’Italiana) today? An Oscar winner for its screenplay, with nominations for both its star (Marcello Mastroianni) and its director (Pietro Germi), it now for some reason languishes in the dusty zone where forgotten movies slumber. Perhaps it’s time to wake it up. It’s a brilliant example of the “sex comedy”, that strangely chaste beast most typified by all those Doris Day and Rock Hudson/James Garner films about bullish males trying to get their leg over and virginal ladies saying no. Sex was never really the issue, it was marriage, an institution that was beginning to chafe in a much more liberal post-War world. Germi wastes no … Read more

A Woman under the Influence

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A distraught Mabel

Peter Falk had been appearing in the Columbo series on TV already for about three years when A Woman under the Influence came out in 1974. It’s a film no one wanted to make, and as well as co-starring, Falk helped finance it, with $500,000 he gave (lent?) to his friend, the maverick indie film-maker John Cassavetes. Once it was made no one wanted to show it either, and Cassavetes was literally walking from distributor to distributor with cans of film under his arm trying to get his new movie screened. And then Martin Scorsese, hot from Mean Streets, stepped in and… the rest is history. Woman ended up with a couple of … Read more

Plan B

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Lupe and Sunny at the drug store

The comedy Plan B hits the road with a pair of young women as they scour the South Dakota badlands for a morning-after pill. If Plan A is not getting pregnant, Plan B is… you follow. Lupe (Victoria Moroles) and Sunny (Kuhoo Verma) are two smart, funny, best buds from strict families – Lupe’s is Hispanic and her father’s a minister, Sunny’s is Asian, with all the educational expectation that typically comes with. Of the two Lupe is the more sexually knowing – she wears vampish dark lipstick – though it’s Sunny who we first encounter thrusting her hand down her pants as she settles down with a school biology textbook and the chapter … Read more

Le Cercle Rouge

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Vogel and Corey face off

Le Cercle Rouge, Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1970 gangster-heist movie, starts with a quote from the Buddha about all men eventually finding themselves inside the red circle. Regardless of what they think they’re up to, or how self-determined their actions are, human beings cannot outwit fate. The quote is entirely bogus, having been written by Melville himself, who picks up and drops the idea of fate/luck/chance throughout his movie, relying on it to operate when he needs a fanciful meeting of two key characters to occur, for example, but keeping it out of the picture for the film’s centrepiece, a long, silent heist sequence. The film is a self-assured and elegant exercise in style and … Read more

Sequin in a Blue Room

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Conor Leach as Sequin

“A Homosexual Film by Samuel Van Grinsven” is how the Sydney-based writer/director describes his feature debut, Sequin in a Blue Room, in the space where the usual “A film by” card comes up. Not “Gay”, not “Queer”. And “Homosexual” as if the film itself were homosexual, which is impossible. Perhaps Van Grinsven is staring down any would-be criticism with a “yeh, what of it?”. Or maybe he’s making it clear to the ninnies who don’t like this sort of thing that this sort of thing is exactly what they’re getting. It’s a love story, in essence, though one overlaid with all the modern-day paraphernalia of dating culture – the apps allowing hook-ups on … Read more

Wrath of Man

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H with a gun

Wrath of Man is director Guy Ritchie and actor Jason Statham’s fourth collaboration since they both broke through in 1998’s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. It’s a remake of the 2004 French movie Cash Truck and opens with the Metro Goldwyn Mayer logo emblazoned in orange lettering against a hazy cityscape. All very 1970s is the initial impression. And it turns out to be a correct impression since what we get with Wrath of Man is a cut and shut of two 1970s staples – the bank heist movie and the revenge thriller. The joys of a Statham film come largely in having our expectations satisfied. He’s a trans-cinematic presence, reliably Statham, … Read more

My People, My Country

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Watching Shenzhou 11

Seven films by seven different Chinese directors comprise My People, My Country, a portmanteau film about key moments in the history of the People’s Republic, all overseen by Chen Kaige (who contributes one of the short films), director of My Beautiful Concubine. At 150 minutes running time that’s a 20-25 minute running time for each film. When people talk about waving the flag they’re usually using the term metaphorically. It’s literal in My People, My Country – rarely can so many flags have been waved, so fervently, up front, in the background or off to the side. They’re a disparate bunch of films, as portmanteaus tend to be, but patriotism is in no short … Read more