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According to conspiracy theorists, Kubrick shot the Moon landings. Peter Hyams is in some respects a better candidate. His Capricorn One is all about a faked journey into space, and is undoubtedly the inspiration behind many of the whisperings about Nasa making the whole thing up. Why does Kubrick get name-checked so much more often … Read more
This tricky but not tricksy feature debut for writer/director Alessandra Lacorazza Samudio is a lightly dramatised account of the summers spent with her sister visiting her dad in New Mexico. Tricky because it’s a film about a lack rather than a presence, a failure to connect on both sides – though both dad and the … Read more
“Life is goddam black and I photograph life.” Andre De Toth’s thumbnail manifesto is perfectly illustrated by Play Dirty, his last film and one of his ugliest. Critics hated it, though you sense it was the nihilism of the movie they really had an issue with rather than the various issues they cited. War is … Read more
Are you still here? That’s how I approached Despicable Me 4, an intellectual property that had done all its emotional work already in the first movie – how super-super villain Gru became a decent sort – but somehow miraculously re-purposed itself and sailed on to franchise glory. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this fourth iteration … Read more
There was barely any plastic around in 1925 when The Plastic Age debuted. “Plastic” in this context has its original sense of something easily moulded – “rendering the material more plastic”, my dictionary offers as an example. That “material” in this case is a young man and his “Age” is the reason he’s so biddable, … Read more
Lily Gladstone shot Fancy Dance in breaks in the filming of Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon. His film might be the reason why she got the gig on the fiction debut of documentarian Erica Tremblay. Or maybe not. Either way, Gladstone repays Tremblay’s compliment with a performance every bit as eye-catching as the … Read more
The Day of the Jackal would probably appeal to the members of a Facebook group called the Dull Men’s Club – recent topics include fuel efficiency while driving, insulating old buildings and dealing with nail fungus. The Dull Men’s Club (a Dull Men’s and Women’s Club also exists) loves detail, procedure, process, how things work and … Read more
Janet Planet is interesting on all sorts of levels but the title is a good place to start. Because the film is really concerned with Lacy, a girl of about 11 who is withdrawn and self-absorbed, friendless and a bit weird but sweet, smart and nice with it. Why she has no friends seems like … Read more
Rudolph Valentino made The Eagle in 1925 and while it wasn’t a smash along the lines of Blood and Sand or The Sheik, it did better than his previous four films – it was a comeback of sorts, and came not long before Valentino was whisked to the place from which no comeback is possible, … Read more
Femme has a really powerful premise – a black drag artist in full cross-dressed glory is beaten up one night by a white tattooed thug for being a “faggot”, then months later happens upon the same guy in, of all places, a gay sauna. The angry closeted homophobe clearly doesn’t recognise the meek black guy … Read more
It’s often said that Jean-Luc Godard’s Two or Three Things I Know About Her (2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle) has no narrative throughline, that it’s freeform, experimental, avant-garde and so on. This is both true and not true. There is a story, though Godard does his best to hide it, of a … Read more
It’s been nearly 40 years since Pixar got going in the, yes, garage of one of its founders, and in that time it’s gone from being cult item to monster indie to part of the Disney mega-stable. Inside Out 2 comes at an interesting point in its history. Pixar is now part of the cultural … Read more
