Steve

S-a Furat o Bombă aka A Bomb Was Stolen

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Iurie Darie as Om

The Romanian animator Ion Popescu-Gopo’s live-action film S-a Furat o Bombă (translated as A Bomb Was Stolen or They Stole the Bomb) was selected to compete for the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1962. It had very little chance of winning, since it was up against Bresson’s The Trial of Joan of Arc, Varda’s Cléo de 5 à 7, Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel, Antonioni’s L’Eclisse and Satyajit Ray’s Devi. But it was there, an achievement in itself for someone who’d never made a live-action film before. Popescu-Gopo’s animated short, Scurtă Historie (A Brief History) had won the Short Film Palme d’Or in 1957. It’s also a film without dialogue, another potential handicap, though … Read more

Avatar: The Way of Water

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Sam Worthington as Jake

Discounting the documentaries about voyages to the bottom of the sea, James Cameron’s last two movies were 1997’s Titanic and 2009’s Avatar. Titanic was the biggest grossing movie of all time, until Avatar replaced it at the top. Success breeds sequels but with the best will in the world it’s hard to imagine what a Titanic follow-up would be about (Titanic II – “it’s still at the bottom of the Atlantic”). The same cannot be said about Avatar, and so it came as no surprise when Cameron announced in 2010 that a sequel was in the works. It took 12 years to get it onto the screens, in large part because Cameron decided … Read more

Smashing Time

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Michael York as Tom Wabe

London in all its 1960s Swinging glory is what Smashing Time offers, in what’s meant to be a satire on the time and the place but is more a jaunt around the zeitgeist’s tourist landmarks strapped to some weak songs and very feeble comedy. I kid you not, there is a banana skin gag. Rita Tushingham and Lynn Redgrave play Brenda and Yvonne, a pair of friends from “up north” who arrive in London determined to locate Carnaby Street and plug straight into the scene. Instead they find themselves penniless, having been robbed the minute they arrived in the capital. From here bullish, stupid Yvonne and timid, smart Brenda’s paths diverge slightly, allowing … Read more

Renfield

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Dracula cackles over Renfield

Universal’s ongoing attempt to build a cinematic universe to rival (in its dreams) Marvel’s or even DC’s continues with Renfield, which has a task all of its own – how to get Dracula’s familiar into the spotlight all on his own, without his master stealing his thunder. Even casting handsome, likeable Nicholas Hoult as Renfield it’s an impossible task and you’ve got to question the wisdom of getting Nicolas Cage in to play Dracula. Here’s a man who needs no invitation to overdo it being handed the keys to the scenery-chewing kingdom. And Cage runs wild in it, giving a performance of manically comic proportions. The premise: after a disastrous encounter with some … Read more

Act of Violence

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Janet Leigh and Van Heflin

A man arrives in a small, neat town in California. It’s a bright sunny day but he’s brought a sliver of dark, noirish New York with him on the Greyhound bus. And also a gun. As he limps across the street away from the bus station, a band plays, veterans march and flags flutter. It’s Memorial Day. Joe is in town to kill an old Army buddy. Like those implacable, remorseless creatures from It Follows, Joe relentlessly pursues his victim. To the nice house in the suburbs that his quarry, war veteran Frank, helped build. Out to the lake where Frank has gone fishing. Back to his house after Frank realises he’s being … Read more

Return to Seoul

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Park Ji-min as Freddie

A woman born in South Korea but then raised in France returns to the land of her birth to look up her birth parents. And that’s the basic plot outline of Return to Seoul, a fictional reworking of the true story of Korean-born, France-raised Laure Badufle, who wrote this movie with director Davy Chou. This is a film that knows very well that there’s are a welter of genealogy-adjacent TV shows out there with titles like Long Lost Family. Who Do You Think You Are?, the globally most successful of them has been around for 20 years and exists in all sorts of iterations, under all sorts of titles, acquainting people with their … Read more

Bunny Lake Is Missing

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Ann in a toy hospital surrounded by dolls

Almost everyone is a sexual pervert in 1965’s Bunny Lake Is Missing, a heady and not entirely coherent psychological thriller with melodramatic tendencies and swivelling eyes to match. Directed by Otto Preminger, a man with a love of the lurid, and with American stars in the lead, it was shot in the UK, away from the chokehold of American puritanism. And what a collection of weirdos Preminger puts on screen as he tells the story of the Lakes, a couple whose daughter disappears on her first day at a sweet and twee school in London’s well heeled Hampstead. At any rate Preminger lets us believe they are a couple, man and wife, until … Read more

Air

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Phil Knight (Ben Affleck) with his bare feet on his desk

Hollywood fixes capitalism, just like it used to do in the 1980s, with Air, the story of Nike getting together with basketball ace Michael Jordan to create the Air Jordan, the most popular sneaker of all time. Like Jordan, it’s got the skills, is light on its feet and moves at pace, introducing first the era in its opening moments with the Dire Straits song Money for Nothing behind a montage of Ronald Reagan, Princess Diana, Rubik’s Cubes, The A Team, dial-up modems and Jane Fonda (workout era). Then, barely pausing for breath, it’s on to its dramatis personae – persona, really, since this story focuses hard on central character Sonny Vaccaro (Matt … Read more

Twilight

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István Lénart as a neurologist

First up, no, not that Twilight. There’s no room for ancient vampires chasing virginal teenagers in 1990’s Szürkület (to give it its original Hungarian title), directed by György Fehér and shot in a distinctive black and white. The story is by Swiss writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt and would be used again in 2001’s The Pledge, the existential murder thriller directed by Sean Penn where Jack Nicholson’s detective on the point of retirement makes a promise to a grieving family that he’ll find the killer of their murdered child, a promise that drives him to the brink of madness. It’s the same here, but Fehér’s treatment couldn’t be more different from Penn’s if he’d tried … Read more

All Quiet on the Western Front

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Paul in unform ready for action

Not a remake, say the team behind 2022’s All Quiet on the Western Front, referring to the legendary 1930 movie anyone would be a fool to try and remake. More another adaptation of the book it was based on, they say, Erich Maria Remarque’s serialised novel from 1928 about the grim reality of the First World War from the average soldier’s point of view. This is true. I’ve seen both, and the 1930 version less than six months ago, so can easily see what’s different in this adaptation. Absent, for example, is the class element – they were posh boys in the 1930 film and one of their great bugbears once they’d joined … Read more