June 2023 | MovieSteve

Sisu

2023-06-20 by Steve

Sisu is the return to form that Finnish director Jalmari Helander’s fans were hoping for. If he’d died after his feature debut, 2010’s Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale, he could have shuffled off to Tuonela knowing he’d made a funny, grisly Christmas movie like no other. But he followed up with Big Game, an attempt to weld Helander’s dark ethos to something more obviously Hollywood (it starred Samuel L Jackson), which not only didn’t quite satisfy either camp but also diluted the Rare Exports story a touch. TV work followed and now Sisu, a dark, bloodlusty, periodically howlingly funny film that reverses Helander out of that corner. First Blood is the inspiration, Helander … Read more

The Scoundrel

2023-06-19 by Steve

The Scoundrel is a gift from two great writers to Noël Coward, a chance for the playwright, screenwriter, director, actor and impresario to do his thing in a Hollywood setting for a change, rather than on the stages of Broadway or London’s West End. A highly epigrammatic, almost drawing-room dramedy, it’s high in tone from the opening credits onwards, with the spirit of Oscar Wilde (still a living memory to many in 1935 when this was made) hovering waspishly over the entire production, the tale of an utter scoundrel (Coward) being served. It’s Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur writing, producing and directing. Two of the very greatest screenplay writers, Hecht and MacArthur wrote … Read more

Law of Tehran

2023-06-18 by Steve

Cop Samad Majidi points a gun towards the camera

On the face of it Law of Tehran is a very simple movie. It’s the story of a cop trying to find a drugs kingpin and what happens when he does. But as well as being a crime thriller, Saeed Roustayi’s second movie also manages to be a nuanced psychological drama, a survey of the Iranian justice system and a critique of the “war on drugs”, with acting at a very high level and film-making of real vision and ability. A cop searches for Tehran’s current Mr Big of drugs, finds him and locks him in detention awaiting a trial. And then the games begin as the bad guy, Naser Khakzad (Navid Mohammadzadeh) … Read more

Red

2023-06-17 by Steve

Pausing momentarily from a binge-watch of the TV show Succession to watch something else with Brian Cox in it – Red, a 2008 movie which went largely unnoticed. For good reason, it turns out, though there is a good film lurking in here somewhere. It was beset by problems – original director fired, Cox’s original co-star also fired – which is how come it’s Trygve Allister Diesen behind the camera and Kim Dickens in front of it with Cox (Cox is also an executive producer so might, Logan Roy style, have ordered the firings, or might not have – speculate away). It’s a John Wick-before-John Wick story of a guy whose dog gets killed, which … Read more

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania

2023-06-16 by Steve

First Ant-Man, then Ant-Man and the Wasp and now Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, an element added to the title each time, the films also getting longer on each new iteration. Longer, busier, more sclerotic, this could be the worst Marvel Cinematic Universe movie to date, and that’s including Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. This is also the first movie in phase five of the MCU, aka the Multiverse saga (if it’s the 2020s there must be multiverses), but never mind whether it calls into question the likelihood of there ever being a phase six (it doesn’t – Deadpool 3 is already in the works), it should raise all sorts … Read more

Joanna

2023-06-15 by Steve

“The baroque signifies rebellion against the constraints of classicism,” is the key line in Michael Sarne’s Swinging London movie from 1968, Joanna. A more-is-more display of the excessive, it attempts to get several quarts into a pint pot, to import some Godard smarts and Fellini flash into staid British film-making and generally to baroque’n’roll things up as much as it can. In what verges on the incoherent but just about sticks to a story, the thin plot follows new-in-town 18-year-old Joanna (Geneviève Waïte) as she meets people on the London scene, sleeps with men, attends art school when she can be bothered (which is where the line about the baroque comes in) and … Read more

Magic Mountains

2024-03-192023-06-14 by Steve

So you broke up with someone and now they’ve got in touch to ask you if you’d like to go climbing with them, just like the two of you used to. One last hurrah, kind of thing, a farewell to all that. You decide to go, though it doesn’t seem like a very good idea. Before anything else happens, Urszula Antoniak’s Magic Mountains, a brooding yet brief (only 81 minutes) exercise in mood management, has to explain why Hannah (Hannah Hoekstra) would accept this invitation from former boyfriend Lex (Thomas Ryckewaert) to go to the Tata mountains in Slovakia. Antoniak does it adroitly, in a scene which establishes the entire mood of the … Read more

S-a Furat o Bombă aka A Bomb Was Stolen

2023-06-13 by Steve

The Romanian animator Ion Popescu-Gopo’s live-action film S-a Furat o Bombă (translated as A Bomb Was Stolen or They Stole the Bomb) was selected to compete for the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1962. It had very little chance of winning, since it was up against Bresson’s The Trial of Joan of Arc, Varda’s Cléo de 5 à 7, Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel, Antonioni’s L’Eclisse and Satyajit Ray’s Devi. But it was there, an achievement in itself for someone who’d never made a live-action film before. Popescu-Gopo’s animated short, Scurtă Historie (A Brief History) had won the Short Film Palme d’Or in 1957. It’s also a film without dialogue, another potential handicap, though … Read more

Avatar: The Way of Water

2023-06-12 by Steve

Discounting the documentaries about voyages to the bottom of the sea, James Cameron’s last two movies were 1997’s Titanic and 2009’s Avatar. Titanic was the biggest grossing movie of all time, until Avatar replaced it at the top. Success breeds sequels but with the best will in the world it’s hard to imagine what a Titanic follow-up would be about (Titanic II – “it’s still at the bottom of the Atlantic”). The same cannot be said about Avatar, and so it came as no surprise when Cameron announced in 2010 that a sequel was in the works. It took 12 years to get it onto the screens, in large part because Cameron decided … Read more

Smashing Time

2023-06-11 by Steve

London in all its 1960s Swinging glory is what Smashing Time offers, in what’s meant to be a satire on the time and the place but is more a jaunt around the zeitgeist’s tourist landmarks strapped to some weak songs and very feeble comedy. I kid you not, there is a banana skin gag. Rita Tushingham and Lynn Redgrave play Brenda and Yvonne, a pair of friends from “up north” who arrive in London determined to locate Carnaby Street and plug straight into the scene. Instead they find themselves penniless, having been robbed the minute they arrived in the capital. From here bullish, stupid Yvonne and timid, smart Brenda’s paths diverge slightly, allowing … Read more