Month: September 2021

Annette

by
Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard

The formidably talented maverick Leos Carax hasn’t made a feature in nine years, nothing since 2012’s batshit Holy Motors, so that’s one thing to thank the new movie Annette for. Whether Annette actually is a Carax movie at all is the question though. How so, you ask. Because Annette is written by Ron (he of toothbrush moustache) and Russell (he of swooping voice) Mael, the brothers behind Sparks, the US band that bounced into the zeitgeist in 1974 with the song This Town Ain’t Big Enough for the Both of Us, and has returned, comet-like, every few years since with material ear-catching and interesting enough to win new fans. Originally bracketed with the … Read more

The Magnificent Ambersons

by
Lucy and George

The film that never was, a magnificent mess, Orson Welles’s masterpiece, better even than Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons is all these things and more, or perhaps less, since no one apart from a handful of people in 1942 has ever seen the finished version. Instead there’s just the version we have, which is minus 50 minutes of material Welles had included in the rough cut he’d made with editor Robert Wise (later of The Sound of Music fame). After negative screenings, a general antipathy towards Welles at RKO and a change of public mood on account of Pearl Harbor having just propelled the USA into the Second World War, the studio ordered … Read more

Roadrunner: a Film about Anthony Bourdain

by
Anthony Bourdain eating

As a film about a person never at ease with himself, Roadrunner: A Film about Anthony Bourdain sketches a compelling if depressing picture of a man who at first didn’t have it all and was unhappy, and then did have it all and was still unhappy. Bourdain died in 2018 and had been famous since the publication of his 2000 memoir Kitchen Confidential turned him into a celebrity at a global level. “It was literally overnight,” he remembers in archive footage, and Roadrunner begins his story more or less about there, barely touching on his years as a heroin addict, a vital piece of the Bourdain jigsaw. And so, merely alluding to the … Read more

Censor

by
Enid covered in blood

Censor twists the horror movie into something it usually isn’t – a political satire. It’s set in the 1980s, when a media-confected moral panic about “video nasties” forced the UK government into regulating what had been until then the entirley unregulated market in home videos, kept supplied by thousands of tiny one-man (they usually were men) operations run out of corner shops up and down the country. Until then the “board of film classification”, as it’s coyly known – an organisation funded by the industry and not by government – had dealt with theatrical releases only. There was barely anything else, after all. But as a result of the Video Recordings Act 1984, … Read more

The Man Who Came to Dinner

by
Monty Woolley, Bette Davis, Ann Sheridan

The Man Who Came to Dinner claims to star Bette Davis, but this is not true. The real star – the person around whom the story revolves, who drives the plot and takes up most of the screen time – is Monty Woolley, as the eponymous “man”. He’s the hoity-toity metropolitan-elite writer who arrives in a nowheresville town along with his personal assistant Maggie (Davis), complaining loudly of having to have dinner with “mid-western barbarians”. The Stanleys (Grant Mitchell, Billie Burke) are middle-class stalwarts – he’s in ball bearings, she’s a fluttery wife – and she’s delighted that Sheridan Whiteside (Woolley) has deigned to grace them with his presence. Until Whiteside slips on the … Read more

Staying Vertical

by
Léo, Marie and her father

Structured like a dream, or a nightmare, Staying Vertical (Rester Vertical in the original French) is populated with character types – the writer, the young man, the grandfather, the doctor, the farmer, the farmer’s daughter. And it has wolves in it too, which feature almost as a threat or an element from a fairytale until they make an actual appearance right at the end. Imagine Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon brought up to date. Damien Bonnard is the Lyndon-esque Léo, a young man on the make, a rake, a bullshitter, a fantasist, who we first encounter hitting on a handsome young man. “Do you want to be in the movies?” asks Léo, using the … Read more

Ares

by
Ares is readied for a fight

There’s a Marvel character called Ares, and a DC one, strangely enough. A Greek god also goes by the same name, as does the hero of Ares (Arès, originally), a dystopian French actioner mainly remarkable for how unremarkable it is. Reda Arèsilla (Ola Rapace), to give him his full name, lives in Paris in 2035, in a country that’s being propped up by payments from the Chinese. Millions are unemployed, neoliberalism has been taken to its conclusion and the “fuck you” dynamics of a devil-take-the-hindmost logic are triumphant. Ares, as he’s known, is one of the lucky ones. He fights for a living, in a culture that prizes its fighters. The bouts are TV … Read more

Lorelei

by
Lorelei and Wayland

People at a decisive moment of their lives is what Lorelei is about. Or, more specifically people who should be at a decisive moment of their lives but whose circumstances are so proscribed that they’re incapable of seeing an opportunity offered, even when one does come along. Wayland is fresh out of jail after 15 years. A former biker with an iron-cross neck tattoo, he alone who took the fall for an armed robbery gone wrong. Now, his old gang are there at the gates to welcome him back to the outside world but can offer him little in the way of support beyond the initial booze and babes party. Instead, a helping … Read more

She Dies Tomorrow

by
Kate Lyn Sheil

Great title, She Dies Tomorrow, full of “duh duh duuuh” foreboding. It’s directed and written by Amy Seimetz and stars Katy Lyn Sheil as a woman dealing with the aftermath of an emotional break-up. She does this initially by playing Mozart’s Requiem a lot and crushing dry leaves between her fingers, as if to feel the warp and weft of life for the last time, while looking at different styles of cremation urn online and also choosing an outfit for a special occasion… like lying in a casket, maybe? The character Sheil is playing is called Amy and Seimetz herself not too long before setting out to make this movie broke up with … Read more

The Dark End of the Street

by
Jim and Richard get wasted

This tantalising drama is the second film by writer/director Kevin Tran, and the second one to be called The Dark End of the Street – his first was a short and is the basis for this extended version, also, at 69 minutes, quite short. Robert Altman is at least partly the inspiration for a string of stories all set on the same suburban street and which increasingly start to coalesce. In rapid succession we meet Isaac (Michael Cyril Creighton) out walking his dog, Marney (Brooke Bloom) just home from work and shocked to discover that her cat has been killed, the Korean family over the road who are horrified at the news, Jim … Read more