Month: June 2023

Renfield

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Dracula cackles over Renfield

Universal’s ongoing attempt to build a cinematic universe to rival (in its dreams) Marvel’s or even DC’s continues with Renfield, which has a task all of its own – how to get Dracula’s familiar into the spotlight all on his own, without his master stealing his thunder. Even casting handsome, likeable Nicholas Hoult as Renfield it’s an impossible task and you’ve got to question the wisdom of getting Nicolas Cage in to play Dracula. Here’s a man who needs no invitation to overdo it being handed the keys to the scenery-chewing kingdom. And Cage runs wild in it, giving a performance of manically comic proportions. The premise: after a disastrous encounter with some … Read more

Act of Violence

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Janet Leigh and Van Heflin

A man arrives in a small, neat town in California. It’s a bright sunny day but he’s brought a sliver of dark, noirish New York with him on the Greyhound bus. And also a gun. As he limps across the street away from the bus station, a band plays, veterans march and flags flutter. It’s Memorial Day. Joe is in town to kill an old Army buddy. Like those implacable, remorseless creatures from It Follows, Joe relentlessly pursues his victim. To the nice house in the suburbs that his quarry, war veteran Frank, helped build. Out to the lake where Frank has gone fishing. Back to his house after Frank realises he’s being … Read more

Return to Seoul

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Park Ji-min as Freddie

A woman born in South Korea but then raised in France returns to the land of her birth to look up her birth parents. And that’s the basic plot outline of Return to Seoul, a fictional reworking of the true story of Korean-born, France-raised Laure Badufle, who wrote this movie with director Davy Chou. This is a film that knows very well that there’s are a welter of genealogy-adjacent TV shows out there with titles like Long Lost Family. Who Do You Think You Are?, the globally most successful of them has been around for 20 years and exists in all sorts of iterations, under all sorts of titles, acquainting people with their … Read more

Bunny Lake Is Missing

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Ann in a toy hospital surrounded by dolls

Almost everyone is a sexual pervert in 1965’s Bunny Lake Is Missing, a heady and not entirely coherent psychological thriller with melodramatic tendencies and swivelling eyes to match. Directed by Otto Preminger, a man with a love of the lurid, and with American stars in the lead, it was shot in the UK, away from the chokehold of American puritanism. And what a collection of weirdos Preminger puts on screen as he tells the story of the Lakes, a couple whose daughter disappears on her first day at a sweet and twee school in London’s well heeled Hampstead. At any rate Preminger lets us believe they are a couple, man and wife, until … Read more

Air

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Phil Knight (Ben Affleck) with his bare feet on his desk

Hollywood fixes capitalism, just like it used to do in the 1980s, with Air, the story of Nike getting together with basketball ace Michael Jordan to create the Air Jordan, the most popular sneaker of all time. Like Jordan, it’s got the skills, is light on its feet and moves at pace, introducing first the era in its opening moments with the Dire Straits song Money for Nothing behind a montage of Ronald Reagan, Princess Diana, Rubik’s Cubes, The A Team, dial-up modems and Jane Fonda (workout era). Then, barely pausing for breath, it’s on to its dramatis personae – persona, really, since this story focuses hard on central character Sonny Vaccaro (Matt … Read more

Twilight

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István Lénart as a neurologist

First up, no, not that Twilight. There’s no room for ancient vampires chasing virginal teenagers in this Twilight from 1990, directed by György Fehér, shot in a distinctive black and white and using the Hungarian language. Hence the original title, Szürkület. The story is by Swiss writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt and has already been used once before, in 2001’s The Pledge, the existential murder thriller directed by Sean Penn where Jack Nicholson’s detective on the point of retirement makes a promise to a grieving family that he’ll find the killer of their murdered child, a promise that drives him to the brink of madness. It’s the same here, but Fehér’s treatment couldn’t be more … Read more

All Quiet on the Western Front

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Paul in unform ready for action

Not a remake, say the team behind 2022’s All Quiet on the Western Front, referring to the legendary 1930 movie anyone would be a fool to try and remake. More another adaptation of the book it was based on, they say, Erich Maria Remarque’s serialised novel from 1928 about the grim reality of the First World War from the average soldier’s point of view. This is true. I’ve seen both, and the 1930 version less than six months ago, so can easily see what’s different in this adaptation. Absent, for example, is the class element – they were posh boys in the 1930 film and one of their great bugbears once they’d joined … Read more

Les Barbouzes

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The spies assembled

It’s called The Great Spy Chase in English, which captures the caper/shenanigans nature of this French film whose original title is Les Barbouzes. “Barbe” is the French word for beard (hence barber in English), which is what spies in ye olden times were supposed to hide behind, hence the French slang term for them – barbouzes. That all cleared up here we are in 1964 two years on from James Bond’s first screen outing in Dr No and one year on from The Pink Panther, which is closer in spirit to this comedy of bumbling ineptitude about a French spy on a mission to return a dead arms dealer’s body to his beautiful … Read more

Marcel the Shell with Shoes On

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Marcel the shell

When Jenny Slate and Dean Fleischer Camp first started work on the short Marcel the Shell with Shoes On they were an item. By the time this feature-length fourth iteration of Marcel’s adventures arrived on the screens in 2021 they were not. Why the film has themes of break-up, heartbreak and the power of relationships is anyone’s guess – insert your own speculative gloss here. It doesn’t need a backstory of personal woe to make it in the harsh everyday world. It’s the perfectly charming, sweet, sad story of – borrowing Wikipedia’s unbeatable description – “an anthropomorphic seashell outfitted with a single googly eye and a pair of miniature shoes”. Slate voices one-inch-high … Read more

The Legend of Paul and Paula

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Paul and Paula with hippie flowers in their hair

Anyone for The Legend of Paul and Paula, Angela Merkel’s favourite film? At least that’s what the German chancellor (as she was at the time) told an audience at a 2013 screening. Coming out in 1973 when Merkel was 18, it caught the young Merkel at an impressionable age. But she wasn’t alone. The Legend of Paul and Paula is also the most popular film in the entirety of the existence of the German Democratic Republic, where Merkel grew up behind the Iron Curtain. Hugely controversial, it wouldn’t have made it onto the screen at all without the personal blessing of Erich Honecker, East Germany’s boss at the time. Only two years into … Read more