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The bomb of 2022 is what industry somebodies are calling Three Thousand Years of Longing. True, it didn’t do very good box office. It did terrible box office in fact. But streaming will probably claw back some of the deficit, where it’ll almost certainly be watched several times by quite a number of people. It’s … Read more
The good, the bad and the ugly, from the very first one to the most recent, here’s the what and the why of Marvel’s web-spinning, hammer-throwing, shield-tossing, Groot-uttering heroes and superheroes in one handy chunk Who’d have thought, when Iron Man gave birth to the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) in 2008, that more than two … Read more
Daniel Roher’s documentary Navalny starts with a bit of a joke. Roher, interviewing the Russian politician, would-be president, survivor of a gruesome poisoning, and (as I write) prisoner in a Russian jail, asks him how he’d like to be remembered by the Russian people if he is assassinated. Navalny laughs in an affable “guys, do … Read more
Here’s a strange thing – a screwball comedy by master of suspense Alfred Hitchcock. Mr and Mrs Smith is the only one he made and, sad to report, it’s not very good. A “comedy of remarriage”, its plot isn’t a thousand miles away from the one that floated The Philadelphia Story to glory, about a husband … Read more
1932’s Arsène Lupin wasn’t the first movie about the gentleman thief by a long stretch but it is one of the best, thanks to canny casting and a pace that never slackens. The canny casting comes in the shape of the Barrymore brothers, Lionel and John, on screen together in starring roles for the first … Read more
CODA is the acronym for Children of Deaf Adults and the name of a movie whose subject matter might make many people pause before watching. Too worthy maybe. Sign language all over the place. Triumph over adversity mawkishness. Though it won an Oscar for Best Picture, this can be not so much a gong, more … Read more
I Love You Again is a knockabout Hollywood farce, a cock-eyed “comedy of remarriage” – The Philadelphia Story is the king of the genre – done in rat-a-rat style by the crack team of director WS Van Dyke and his stars, William Powell and Myrna Loy. Van Dyke was known as One Take Woody, for reasons … Read more
Capsule plot summaries can be misleading. The one for Clara Sola might say – a woman around 40 in a Costa Rica village has a sexual awakening. It’s more or less what the one on the IMDb says. And it’s not wrong, that is what happens. But the story, that’s a different thing altogether. And … Read more
One of three 1970s thrillers Alan Pakula directed in quick succession, The Parallax View is sandwiched between two better films, Klute (1971) and All the President’s Men (1976), the second leg of what’s now known as his “paranoia trilogy”. Posterity is in the process of polishing The Parallax View’s reputation, with the focus usually on … Read more
True Things is only the second feature from Harry Wootliff, a writer-director fascinated with relationships. And after the slow-burning torture of Only You, she follows up with another rocky road leading to who knows where. Again it’s a two-hander, again the performances are sensational. In Only You Laia Costa and Josh O’Connor were the couple … Read more
Ernst Lubitsch’s 1932 drama Broken Lullaby was originally called The Man I Killed, like the Maurice Rostand play it was based on (L’homme que j’ai tué). It turned out to be a title too hard-hitting for the box office and so it was decided to change it. To The Fifth Commandment. Until some bright spark … Read more
Though the Asgardian deity has appeared in other Avengers movies in the interim,Thor: Love and Thunder is the first outing for Chris Hemsworth’s caped godhead since the last standalone Thor movie, 2017’s Thor: Ragnarok. Time has moved on and we’re now in a different phase of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, one determined to bolt a … Read more
