Month: July 2022

A Man Escaped

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Fontaine scratches marks into the wall

A Man Escaped is probably the best jailbreak movie ever made. Who said Shawshank? What’s more it was made almost as an “anti-movie” movie by a director so disdainful of cinema trickery and excess that he turned out one film after another to demonstrate that you don’t need it all, and that when it comes to drama on the big screen, sound is at least as important as image, possibly more so. Set in 1943 in Nazi-occupied France, it simply follows a Resistance fighter called Lafontaine (François Leterrier) into and then out of prison again. Taken in by the Nazis, escaping under his own steam, using nothing but ingenuity and everyday objects. A … Read more

Turning Red

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Turning Red's big red panda

In Turning Red, a hyperactive 13-year-old Toronto schoolgirl turns into a giant red panda one day – looks like a cat, but panda is what we’re told – and Pixar’s latest animated adventure swings into motion, as do thoughts about what this can all possibly mean. The girl is called Mei, she is the bookish daughter of an immigrant Chinese family and her condition comes on suddenly after Mei has been humiliated by her mother over a crush on a dopey guy who works in a local shop. Mei is becoming an adult. It’s a metaphor for a girl having her first period and becoming a woman, you’d think. Pixar seem to knock that … Read more

Mirror

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A burning barn

The 2012 Greatest Films of All Time poll, conducted every decade by Sight and Sound magazine, has Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror at number 19. On the Critics’ Poll, at any rate. The poll of directors places it even higher, at number 9. So directors like it more than critics, who like it more than the general public, I’m guessing. Because Mirror is a non-linear, plotless affair, a ruminative, nostalgic bask in the past, autobiographical to a large extent, tracing, hopscotch style, Tarkovsky’s early life with a young mother and an absent father – the war was on and dad was fighting the Nazis. The word “oneiric” (dreamlike) is often wheeled out. It’s been called … Read more

Pleasure

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Bella in a pink inflatable

If you want porn, there’s Pornhub, if you want a frank, unapologetic drama about the porn industry, try Pleasure, a Star Is Born (or not) story of a 19-year-old Swedish blow-in trying to make it in LA. Cocks and pussies are not prominent, in other words, though there are enough of them to convince us that director Ninja Thyberg has done her homework (she spent months gaining the trust of people in the biz), and in any case this is the story of wide-eyed, fresh-faced Bella trying to become a “star” rather than just a regular porn actor. Coercion and consent are what this is really about, though, and Pleasure hints at the … Read more

The Running Man

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Stella and Rex

Say The Running Man and most people think of an underwhelming Arnold Schwarzenegger sci-fi/action movie from 1987. But there is another one, from 1963, starring Laurence Harvey, Lee Remick and Alan Bates, and it’s all about a man who goes nuts after getting a sniff of money. The action kicks off in London, where grieving widow Stella (Remick) is making a great show of burying her much loved husband, who recently died in a glider accident off the south coast. But Rex (Harvey) isn’t dead, and the staged accident was part of a scheme to get one over on the insurance company who had, Rex feels, got one over on him by not … Read more

The Feast aka Gwledd

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Cadi and Glenda

There are several good reasons for watching The Feast, aka Gwledd, and one of the least important is that it’s a horror movie in Welsh, more often seen as a lyrical bardic language of song and poetry rather than blood and dismemberment. But Welsh horror it is, and director Lee Haven Jones gets off to a moody start with some Kubrick-esque glides down the long corridors of the remote modernist house where the action is set. It’s the weekend home to smug Member of Parliament Gwyn (Julian Lewis Jones), his vinegary wife Glenda (Nia Roberts) and his two troubled sons. Gweirydd (Sion Alun Davies) is the more obviously nuts, a fanatical cyclist who … Read more

Henry V

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Laurence Olivier as Henry V

Laurence Olivier didn’t want to direct Henry V. He was nervous about taking it on, what with having no actual directing experience and this being a film hoping to raise British morale during the Second World War (it was part financed by the government). Olivier asked William Wyler, his Wuthering Heights director, to take it on. Wyler declined, and so, later, did Carol Reed. Both told him the same thing – if it’s Shakespeare then it’s got to be you. Oliver screwed up his courage to the sticking place (to borrow a line from Macbeth) and got to work. The result is a magnificent hybrid of the theatrical and the cinematic, with the longest … Read more

Flux Gourmet

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Asa Butterfield, Fatma Mohamed and Ariane Labed

Peter Strickland goes Greek Weird Wave with Flux Gourmet, a bizarre farce of sorts poking mild fun specifically at experimental theatre groups and more generally at artistic snobbery. The Sonic Catering Institute is an artistic foundation run out of a baronial mansion by Jan Stevens (Gwendoline Christie), an eccentric, persnickety, over-enunciating control freak who routinely gives over her artistic space to itinerant groups to produce spectacular art works featuring food and sound. The current incumbents are a threesome led by the highly strung and forthright Elle di Elle (Fatma Mohamed). Her assistants, Lamina Propria (Ariane Labed) and Billy Rubin (Asa Butterfield), provide the food prep and sonic backgrounds while Elle dances, often naked. … Read more

La Notte

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Jeanne Moreau and Marcello Mastroianni

It’s called The Night, the IMDb tells us, though I’ve never heard Antonioni’s 1961 drama called anything but La Notte. So let’s use the original title. It’s pithy. As Italian phrases go this one is not hard to say and it’s distinctive. There are plenty of films called The Night already. The title is as stark as the film’s opening moments. The credits are written in an unfussy sans serif font. The theme music is atonal. The first images we see are of glass and steel buildings shot to emphasise their angularity. La Notte is the mid-century modern movie – sleek, unadorned, made out of good materials and not entirely comfortable. Isn’t life … Read more

Happening

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Anamaria Vartolomei as Anne

Happening (L’événement) really is a happening, a remarkable film about a subject that seems to demand a certain sort of treatment which goes out of its way not to deliver it. The subject is abortion in a country where it is illegal, France in the early 1960s, where we meet Anne, probably the prettiest of three good-looking young women, certainly the smartest, most studious and level-headed and the one most likely to be about to do something with her life. Anne has her good friends, her university studies, the parents at home who adore her and who she visits at weekends. Director Audrey Diwan paints the picture with a few sunny strokes, the … Read more