Latest Posts
As witty and ingenious as the best of its predecessors, Final Destination: Bloodlines revives the old franchise after a 14-year hiatus, number six in the series keeping faith with an idea originating in a script for The X-Files that was killed off before making it to the screen. Which is appropriate, since the Final Destination … Read more
There are two versions of the 1982 adaptation of Thomas Mann’s weighty novel The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg). One is the theatrical cut, which came in at about 153 minutes. The other is the TV cut, which weighs in at an epic 312 minutes over three instalments. That’s the one I watched yesterday, all five … Read more
Well it’s an African Festen, isn’t it? I’m going to say immediately what most reviewers seem to get around to saying eventually. But On Becoming a Guinea Fowl is much more than just a dark drama about family secrets coming to light at a family gathering, so memorably wrangled in Thomas Vinterberg’s 1998 film. The … Read more
A Soviet Brief Encounter of sorts, Three Poplars on Plyuschikha Street is the sort of film you don’t really imagine coming out of the USSR, if grand epics featuring the entire Red Army are what you are used to. It’s a small-scale but beautifully crafted romance and in its day it was hugely popular. That … Read more
No one involved in Jericho Ridge thinks they’re making art, but neither do they think they’re making trash. It’s the sort of movie that keeps an industry alive – well made, well acted, decent-enough if familiar story and a satisfying conclusion all round, especially if you like happy endings served with lashings of gory violence. … Read more
There’s a fascinating factoid at the centre of Renoir, Gilles Bourdos’s film about the old painter Pierre-Auguste and his son, the future-filmmaker Jean. Both men shared the same muse. Andrée Heuschling was the last in a long line of life models for the aged Impressionist, a celebrity painter who by the end of the First … Read more
Hardscrabble lives are what film-maker Tatiana Huezo specialises in and that’s what she gives us in The Echo (El Eco), a documentary following three families in a Mexican village, particularly the girls just coming of age and contemplating a future of mixed possibilities. A couple of years ago Huezo gave us the excellent Prayers for … Read more
A beautiful young woman glides through life bewitching the men around her in Antonio Pietrangeli’s I Knew Her Well (Io la conoscevo bene). Stefania Sandrelli, a knockout in real life who won a beauty contest and went to Rome to become a film star, plays Adriana Astarelli (similarly alliterative names surely no coincidence), a beauty … Read more
Annie Ernaux won the Nobel Prize for literature for a body of autobiographical body of work charting her own life. The Super 8 Years is pretty much more of the same, except in filmic form. At its most basic and off-putting level it’s a “what I did on my holidays” narration over clips from a … Read more
Barbara Loden only made one feature film and Wanda is it. A remarkable piece of determinedly non-Hollywood vérité, it features no hero, comes with no moralistic teachable points and hasn’t got much of a plot, unless a relentless slide towards the abyss counts as one. Loden was inspired to make it after reading a newspaper … Read more
Monster Hunters, not to be confused with Monster Hunter starring Milla Jovovich. Scratch that thought. Because half the thing about any of these Asylum “mockbusters” is that confusion is at least half of the deal. So many Asylum movies ride on the coattails of the advertising spends of much bigger movies, maybe peeling off a … Read more
A crazy mixed up film about a crazy mixed up girl, if it’s nothing else 1983’s Á Nos Amours (To Our Loves, sometimes To Our Romance) is a brilliant showcase for the astonishing Sandrine Bonnaire, sexy as young French stars tend to be, in her debut on screen, possessing it entirely and aged only 15 … Read more
