Month: September 2021

Azor

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Ivan in a dark room with two heavies

A Swiss banker arrives in Argentina in 1980 looking for his partner, who’s mysteriously disappeared. Writer/director Andreas Fontana’s debut feature Azor tracks the progress of Ivan de Wiel, which is anything but straightforward, in an oblique, tangential, mood-soaked almost-thriller that’s more about the journey than the destination. Being Argentina in 1980, with a military junta in charge, strict class hierarchies in place and much of the “action” (there’s almost none) taking place in dark corners of colonial hotels where seedy middle aged and old white guys swap favours, the spectre of Graham Greene arises unbidden from the shadows. Ivan de Wiel (Fabrizio Rongione) is your Greene-esque anti-hero, an old-school Swiss banker trying to … Read more

Profile

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Valene Kane as Melody

Profile is a 2018 drama about a journalist who poses online as a teenage Muslim convert from London to strike up a relationship with an Islamist jihadi fighting out in Syria. The immediate suprise of it is that this simple, high concept film rooted in political reality is directed by Timur Bekmambetov, the Russian/Kazakh director who first came to prominence with Night Watch, a supernatural fantasy conceived on a massive scale, with a sizeable cast and a broad canvas. Profile’s first shot is of a Facebook profile, which Amy (Valene Kane) is trying to fill out – what to call herself, how old should she say she is, which part of London does … Read more

The Platform

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Ivan Massagué stars as Goreng

In The Platform (El Hoyo, in the original Spanish) a man wakes up in a place that isn’t familiar, a place full of dread and fear located in a world that seems to operate by different rules. He may not know where he is, but we know where we are: in one of those high concept “escape room” horror movies, the best of which still remains Vincenzo Natali’s sleek Cube, from 1997, which almost single-handedly kick-started the genre. Almost. Because the real inspiration for these things is Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1944 existentialist play Huis Clos, which follows the discussions of three characters locked together in the same room in the afterlife for all eternity. … Read more

Who You Think I Am

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Juliette Binoche as Claire

One person stalks another person online in Who You Think I Am (Celle Que Vous Croyez). If it’s not quite as creepy as you might expect, it’s not quite as emotionally engaging as it might be either, which is deliberate. We’re held at arm’s length, while co-writer/director Safy Nebbou gets busy with the mechanics of a plot that reveals all towards the end, and then reveals all one more time. The plot seems quite straightforward. Claire (Juliette Binoche, great as ever) is a teacher of French literature who strikes up a relationship with much younger man Alex, a friend of an ex lover, on a social network we might as well call Facebook, … Read more

Stillwater

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Virgine and Bill walking

There are two stories being told in Stillwater, one well, the other other not so well. Unfortunately for all concerned, it’s the one that’s told not so well that the film insists it’s all about, from its title all the way through to its concluding scenes. At 2 hours 19 minutes you’d have thought that there was time to give both stories a fair screw, but clearly something has happened between greenlighting and debut. That “something” might be lawyers, given what it’s about. Because it’s a loose adaptation of the Amanda Knox story. This was the messy and unsatisfyingly concluded case of the young American woman found guilty of killing a fellow exchange … Read more

The Great Silence

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Jean-Louis Trintignant as Silence

One of the great puzzles about Sergio Corbucci’s 1968 spaghetti western The Great Silence (Il Grande Silenzio) is how shakily it starts. In one gruesomely unsteady shot after another, using lenses that are way too long, cinematographer Silvano Ippoliti appears to be putting on a demonstration of the genre’s technical shortcomings. Distant figures swing wildly all over the frame, rendering action almost impossible to follow. Stick with it, it settles down. By the end, as events build towards a climax that’s satisfying because it’s so unexpected, Ippoliti and Corbucci have relaxed into a groove and are delivering cinematic storytelling at its finest. Scenes play out in as much time as feels necessary, minor … Read more

Minamata

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Aileen and W Eugene Smith

From its title right through to its last gasp, Minamata, a drama based on real events, insists that it isn’t about the photographer W Eugene Smith. But it is. Smith was a photographer who’d distinguished himself in the Second World War and then returned to lay down many of the ground rules of photojournalism at Life magazine, he and it in a creative lockstep from the 1940s till the 1970s, when it ceased weekly publication and he went on to the great darkroom in the sky. The film picks up Smith at the end of his career in 1971: old, drunk, broke, selling off his gear to pay his rent and barely able … Read more

Beasts Clawing at Straws

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Jeon Do-yeon

Beasts Clawing at Straws also goes by the English-language title of Beasts That Cling to the Straw but Rats in a Sack would also be a useful way of translating its original Korean title. It’s a story about different sets of people, all connected by a Louis Vuitton holdall full of cash, which we first see in the movie’s opening shot. Then, in 1960s heist-movie opening-credit style, the camera follows the holdall at its level while an unidentified someone carries it to a left luggage locker and leaves it there. As the movie ends, the bag is once again picked up and the camera follows it, again at bag height, off out onto … Read more

Ikiru

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Watanabe on the swing in the snow

Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru is now old enough – it was released in 1952 – for people to be able to consider it rationally. Almost from the moment it hit the screens it was treated as Kurosawa’s “triumph”, one of the best films ever made, regularly turning up on Sight and Sound magazine’s influential once-a-decade poll of the best movies ever made. Recently, though, it’s slipped a bit. In 1962 it was number 20 on S&S‘s list. By 2012 it’s “only” at number 136, well behind Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (17) and Rashomon (24). A 2016 article in the UK’s Daily Telegraph listing its top 10 most overrated films of all time placed Ikiru at … Read more

Summer Days, Summer Nights

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Pico, Debbie, Frankie, Suzy, Winky and Terry

Summer Days, Summer Nights originally went by the title Summertime, as in the song by DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince, which is interesting because that’s exactly the vibe it has – beautiful young people all just hanging and chilling and cooling about, enjoying the heat, soaking up the rays and basking in the hotness of youth. Maybe the title changed because Ed Burns’s film is set nine years before Jeff Townes and Will Smith had their hit. Maybe the original title makes too ironic the lack of black faces. Who knows? Whatever the reason, here we are on Long Island in 1982 and following a group of six young people – … Read more