Month: September 2023

Jigoku

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Burning in a lake of fire

Big in Japan and inhabiting a “cult” niche in much of the rest of the world, 1960’s Jigoku is also known as Hell or The Sinners of Hell and does pretty much as advertised. It’s a portrait of Hell, its sinners, and what happens to wrongdoers down below after bad lives lived up top. Director and co-writer Nobuo Nakagawa does it as a tale told in two halves. In part one he tells the story of Shirô (Shigeru Amachi), a decent sort of guy, a student who, led astray by his friend Tamura (Yôichi Numata), one night knocks down and kills an innocent bystander, Kyôichi, a death that sets off a long chain … Read more

My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3

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Toula and Lan in sunny Greece

So, in My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3, the Portokalos Family finally make it to Greece! In other news, Nia Vardalos takes over directing duties as well as being writer, star and producer. But in most other respects this is a case of more of the same – nothing wrong with that. To recap. The original movie about a Greek American woman scandalously marrying a non-Greek man was the word-of-mouth monster from 2002 that went on to become – choose your sources – the biggest grossing romantic comedy of all time (I don’t believe this either). Regardless, a big movie. And the 2016 sequel, though no one asked for it, was warmly funny … Read more

Winter Kills

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A bandaged man tells Nick the truth about his dead brother

Nineteen years after the assassination of US President Tim Kegan in 1961, his brother learns from the lips of a dying bandaged man that the official report into who really fired the gun was wrong. I know that, says the dying man, because I was number two rifle that day, and what’s more I’ll tell you where the gun I used has been hidden. Using the murder and bits of the life and family background of President Kennedy as a template, William Richert’s 1979 drama then heads off into the undergrowth for a hack through the weeds of the improbable. Winter Kills isn’t just a conspiracy thriller but a conspiracy thriller constructed like … Read more

Sharp Stick

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Kristine Froseth and Sarah Jo

Like a lot of Lena Dunham’s work, Sharp Stick is a quirky dramedy set among the delusional and self-obsessed. With its strong autobiographical element it sits neatly alongside her early web series Delusional Downtown Divas (which kind of says it all), her breakthrough movie Tiny Furniture, and her TV show Girls. Dunham appears in it, and also produces, writes and directs, but it all hangs on one-time model and star of Netflix’s The Society Kristine Froseth, as a spectacularly naive woman who lives at home with her jaded mother and influencer sister and then gets into sex all of a sudden, aged 26, after seducing the father of the kid she babysits. Dunham … Read more

The Ear

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Ludvik and Anna talk in the darkened kitchen

When director Karel Kachnya was making The Ear (aka Ucho), released in 1970 but not seen until 1990, he must have known it wasn’t going to be seen. Surely? How could he not? We’re in Communist Czechoslovakia, where a married couple are coming home from a Party party. Anna (Jiřina Bohdalová) is drunk and bursting for a piss, Ludvik (Radoslav Brzobohatý) is tired and anxious. Has it been a good evening? Has he said the right thing to the right people? Was the party they were at another leg up in his reasonably glittering career or something else? Ludvik isn’t sure. And now, it seems, they can’t find the keys to the front … Read more

The Eight Mountains

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Alessandro Borghi and Luca Marinelli on top of a mountain

Slow cinema? Not quite, but there’s definitely an aspect of slow cinema in the exquisitely paced The Eight Mountains (Le Otto Montagne), an Italian-language boys-to-men journey through the decades. They meet as 12-year-olds, Pietro a blow-in from the city with his parents, Bruno the local lad and only kid left in this dying village, where his family still milks cows and does things the old way. Initial nervousness out of the way, the two boys become a fierce unit – patrolling the area, examining the many abandoned buildings, swimming in lakes, climbing the hills, the idyllic relationship, Pietro the effete city boy, Bruno the solid country toughie. And then, on the small adventure … Read more

Mr Klein

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Monsieur Klein in the shadows

Mr Klein is a film about a mindset as much as a man or an event. The event is the Holocaust, the mindset is of a man called Mr Klein, played by Alain Delon, a French art dealer who, one day in 1942 in Nazi-occupied Paris, is tagged as being a Jew. But he isn’t Jewish, Mr Klein insists. Why the idea is laughable, absurd. Somewhere in Paris there’s obviously another Monsieur Klein who is Jewish, but I’m not that guy. This is nothing more than a simple case of mistaken identity. And for the rest of the film Monsieur Klein keeps up his protestations, turning detective to try and flush out the … Read more

Zero Fucks Given

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Cassandre runs through the onboard safety procedure

Zero Fucks Given, or the similarly blunt Rien à Foutre in the original French, sometimes also goes by the title Carpe Diem, in parts of the world where fucks actually are given about rude words. No matter what you call it you get the same thing: a detail-rich portrait of the life of the flight attendant, and smuggled inside that a sensitive drama about a young woman whose life is emotionally as up in the air as her job. Don’t worry too much about the sensitive drama bit. You could almost ignore it – though it eventually brings plenty to the table – and still be mightily entertained by this film by Julie … Read more

La poison

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Paul (Michel Simon) gets his moment in court

The misdirection starts early in the superb dark French farce from 1951 La poison (no prizes for guessing it translates as Poison). Right with the title, in fact, which suggests that poison, or a poisoning, is what the film is going to be about. It isn’t. Or it is, but not in the way the title might suggest. But first – more sleight of hand – writer/director Sacha Guitry, a boulevardier of the old school, introduces his cast, by their real names, starting with his star, Michel Simon, a big bear of a man Guitry praises effusively before moving on to Simon’s co-stars, all of whom get the buckets-of-praise treatment. Then on to … Read more

L’immensità

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Penélope Cruz as Clara

Preferring to watch movies unprepped, I hadn’t realised when I started watching L’immensità that its director, Emanuele Crialese, was a trans man (ie started life as a woman). What I did know is that I liked the earlier stuff, movies like Nuovomondo and Respiro, which were beautifully crafted stories demonstrating the writer/director’s way with emotionally engaging characters. The world didn’t know Crialese was trans either, by which I mean the media. Crialese “came out” at the Venice Film Festival as a way of explaining his film, which is set in Rome in the 1970s and focuses on a girl on the verge of puberty who really wants to be a boy. Since Crialese … Read more