Month: June 2022

The Northman

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Alexander Skarsgård

Aryans assemble! Hollywood’s most Nordic get together for The Northman, Robert Eggers’ latest exploration of arcane mindsets, and the sort of film that’s probably on a loop at White Supremacist HQ. The men are tall, blond, hairy and sculpted, the women are fierce, brave and yield only to their liege-lord husband. There is dirt, there are runic inscriptions, there is lore and there are any number of other tokens of authenticity. It’s the hipster version of The Vikings, the one that starred Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis, made in the days when no one particularly minded a pair of New York Jews playing characters out of the Nordic sagas (though there were sniggerings … Read more

Möbius

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Moïse and Alice flirt

Möbius, not Morbius. The Marvel supervillain was still in the uncertain future in 2013 when Eric Rochant wrote and directed this spy thriller set in the chi-chi world of high finance. Also in the future was Rochant’s magnum opus, the brilliant TV series The Bureau (aka Le Bureau des Legendes), for which Möbius can be seen as a dry run. Though TV had already clearly won the Movies v TV race by 2013, old-school movies still had prestige and many were still being made which, all told, should really have been a TV series. The result is too many films of this era with overstuffed storylines, too many characters, too much event, too … Read more

On the Count of Three

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Kevin and Val point guns at each other

Like a Butch and Sundance but with no glory days in the rearview, On the Count of Three is the story of two desperadoes riding towards their moment of reckoning, and opens with Val (Jerrod Carmichael) and Kevin (Christopher Abbott) taking aim at each other’s heads, in a moment of pre-planned mutual annihilation. They don’t go through with it. Spoiler. Well, kind of. This flashforward opener catches up with itself within about ten minutes of this film’s running time, leaving the two smalltown American dudes to spin out the rest of the time in an orgy of nostalgia, payback, bucket-list moments and re-appraisal of lives lived almost totally pointlessly. It’s billed as a … Read more

Cuba Libre

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Tina and Tom fall out

1996’s Cuba Libre is only Christian Petzold’s second movie, after 1995’s debut, Pilots (Pilotinnen), but already he’s got the formula and the team all in place. It’s a chilly thriller, in other words, with a man who’s losing his head over a woman, a woman who’s so otherworldly she might in fact be more metaphysical than real, and an overarching theme of escape, of existing in liminal space, of people perpetually on the way to somewhere else. Petzold insists that all movies are in a sense about transit, or transition, but he’s got a very particular way of doing it. It’s the sense of yearning he imparts. It suffuses everything, to the point … Read more

Morbius

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Close up of Morbius's face

Is Morbius, Marvel’s tragic brooding vampire, a bad guy or good guy? The eponymous movie strings a line between two opposing conceptions of the same individual and hangs Jared Leto out to dry on it – here’s a character and a movie that’s indecisive in a deadly way. So, no, Twitter, it’s not the bad special effects or Leto’s Method acting, or anything else that’s really wrong with the film. The effects are good enough, Leto is good enough – in an “I wish I were Loki” kind of way – but everything in this film just kind of hangs, caught up on the writers’ fatal decision to be faithful to all of Morbius’s history. … Read more

The Memory of a Killer

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Angelo with gun

A hitman’s final job. A cop on the case. A paedophile network run by very well connected men. Corruption at the top end of the police. What could easily have been an identikit crime thriller comes out as something a bit more in The Memory of a Killer, thanks to intelligent direction by Erik Van Looy, fine playing, in particular by Jan Decleir as the conflicted gun-for-hire on the home straight, music by Stephen Warbeck that dives into the rhythmic when the going gets tense, and editing that lifts the whole production a notch and helps make it look like it’s got more than a TV budget behind it. You might know it … Read more

The Duke

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Kempton and Dorothy at home

The Duke is a great example of the sort of film that Brits make for domestic consumption and which often do pretty well internationally as well. Playing up to harmless stereotypes, they’re full of silly sausages with funny voices and odd, eccentric behaviours. Here for the most part it’s Northerners being earthy and honest and principled, while down South a different sort of daffy stereotype – posh, restrained, clean – are hauling on barristers’ outfits and judges’ horsehair wigs to use Latinate turns of phrase in the most rarefied of settings, the courtroom. Both export beautifully. Both reassure the natives even more. The stereotypes are diamond tooled in The Duke, a true story … Read more

Pilots

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Sophie and Karin

Pilots (Pilotinnen) was Christian Petzold’s graduation film, a short feature-length drama which he completed in 1995. At 35, Petzold was quite ancient as students go but he’d studied German and theatre already before switching into film at Berlin’s DFFB. Either way, his film got a showing on the German TV channel ZDF, which isn’t bad at all for a graduation movie. It’s clearly the work of someone who technically is still learning how the vehicle works but thematically knows exactly where he’s heading. It’s not so much Petzold in utero as Petzold in miniature. It’s a two-hander, in essence, and once Petzold has thrown us with an opening shot suggesting that his troubled … Read more