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Starring Aaron Eckhart, the blurbs for Ambush proclaim. Also starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers, they trumpet. Not true, either of them. Connor Paolo is in fact the star of this potentially rather good Vietnam war movie hobbled by a plot lacking sparkle. A Vietnam war movie? In the 2020s? A boldly unfashionable move by Mark Burman, … Read more
A clever, stylish and refreshingly inappropriate Hong Kong thriller from 1988, On the Run throws a beta-male together with the alpha contract killer who killed his wife and then stands back to ask whether they could ever have a relationship – the killer is a female, before you ask, this is 1988 after all. It’s … Read more
Can Robin Hood even be killed? Writer/director Michael Sarnoski thinks he can, and approaches the immortal figure of legend from two different directions in The Death of Robin Hood. Errol Flynn, Kevin Costner, Russell Crowe and Daffy Duck (yes, really), stand back. First up, a dark, wind-blasted and grungy cavalcade of extreme bloodletting. In Sarnoski’s … Read more
Witty, pretty, slick and desperately all over the place, His Kind of Woman throws Jane Russell and Robert Mitchum together for an adventure down Mexico way. Starting out as noir, it goes into a strange, almost existential holding pattern for its curiously satisfying central section before eventually deciding on a comedy finish, helped along by … Read more
Wasteman is a particularly ingenious prison drama, though in many respects it ticks the usual boxes: hyper-masculinity, bullying, drugs, a top dog bossing the show with the tacit assent of the authorities, a rookie prisoner falling foul of said top dog. And this being the 21st century, drones and phones very important. Since the high … Read more
Hitchcock and trains, Hitchcock and trains – even the words seem to run on rails. The Lady Vanishes is the British director’s take on the 1930s craze for the murder mystery on the move. And though Hitchcock could have lent on Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express – published in 1933 to instant acclaim … Read more
You know a film’s struggled a bit when the end credits are the best bit of it. Minions & Monsters is a case in point, a collection of individually brilliant scenes in search of a plot, exemplified by those end credits, which are the one-damn-thing situation distilled. Does anyone not know who the Minions are? … Read more
So here’s Number Seventeen, a Hitchcock film that’s almost never mentioned when Hitchcock is up for discussion. “A disaster,” is how the man himself described it, having been forced into directing it by his studio. But then who remembers Rich and Strange (great title) which came before, or Waltzes from Vienna, which came after? In … Read more
Green kryptonite at the box office, Supergirl is standard superhero fare juiced with Deadpool-style wit and smarts. Well, that’s the intention. In fact, the wit is a bit strained and the smarts are a touch familiar. Everyone is trying just a bit too hard. Put it down to nerves. DC realised their DC Extended Universe … Read more
A wag rather than a humourist, Alfred Hitchcock generally ran into trouble when he tried to make a funny film. Case in point: The Trouble with Harry, an arch confection notable for two things: it was the first time Hitchcock worked with composer Bernard Herrmann; and was also Shirley MacLaine’s screen debut. There are two … Read more
A documentary about a dude who didn’t go for a colonoscopy, André Is an Idiot is a cautionary tale about André Ricciardi, a wild man of advertising who, instead of having a small amount of discomfort during an exploratory procedure when it was offered, stayed at home and wound up with terminal cancer. Ricciardi kicks … Read more
The guys at Second Run DVD sent me Jiří Trnka: Puppet Master, a two-disc Blu-ray set containing Old Czech Legends, The Czech Year and 90 minutes of extras, superb examples of this master of animation’s work and a great place to start for any beginner. Trnka worked in various forms but stop-motion puppetry is what … Read more
