Month: March 2025

Daddio

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Sean Penn as Clark, the driver, in his cab

The conceit of Daddio is that it’s just two people in a car driving from JFK Airport into New York City. It’s a yellow cab and the driver is played by Sean Penn, the passenger by Dakota Johnson. As the car rolls towards the city they talk. At first Clark makes cab driver smalltalk, kneejerk remarks about the modern world and how everything has gone to the bad. Then he shifts on to giving her the wealth of his wisdom, and eventually, after a cool appraisal, she obviously comes to the conclusion that he’s mostly mouth and starts to respond. This is what the film is about, their wide-ranging conversation, but returning regularly … Read more

Sabotage

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Oscar Homolka as the saboteur

Graham Greene didn’t like the films of Alfred Hitchcock, but he did like Sabotage. The novelist was a film critic in his early years and was regularly on Hitchcock’s case for what he described as “inconsistencies, loose ends, psychological absurdities.” Tough room. But, as I say, Sabotage got the Greene seal of approval. Which is odd because it’s not top-flight Hitchcock, though it is worth staying around for the film’s famous sequence towards the end, when Hitchcock sacrifices a character in scenes audiences in 1936 found shocking and Hitchcock himself was uneasy about. It’s based on the Conrad novel The Secret Agent, but since Hitchcock’s previous film had been Secret Agent, the original … Read more

Cottontail

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Akiko standing in shallow water in a lake

Whoosh, Patrick Dickinson’s film Cottontail rushes into the territory generally occupied by Hirokazu Kore-eda. That is, the deceptively simple, beautifully crafted, sensitively acted, tender human drama. He’s even given it a Japanese top coat, since it’s the story of an emotionally inert Tokyo dad whose wife has just died heading to Lake Windermere in the the UK’s Lake District to scatter his wife’s ashes, as per her dying wish. Along for the journey is the son Kenzaburo can barely communicate with, plus son Toshi’s wife and daughter. Kenzaburo didn’t want any of them to come, but those were Toshi’s mother’s dying wishes. Toshi is there for her sake not dad’s. It’s clearly a … Read more