Steve

Ennio

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Ennio Morricone on the podium

Whether you call this long and detailed documentary Ennio: The Glance of Music or Ennio: The Maestro, or just plain old Ennio – all three titles seem to be out there – one thing remains constant. It’s a love letter to one of the most famous film composers who ever lived. It’s directed by Giussepe Tornatore, a master of the billet doux – see Cinema Paradiso – and he brings a picturesque film-maker’s eye to bear on his subject. There’s lovely lighting, a breezy narrative structure and rhythmic editing, and Tornatore carefully montages together the standard-issue clips and reminiscence elements to lift this documentary onto another level. It’s a labour of love. It’s … Read more

Investigation of a Citizen above Suspicion

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Gian Maria Volonté

The twang of a jew’s harp is the first sound you hear in 1970’s Investigation of a Citizen above Suspicion. “BOING,” it goes, slightly ridiculously, the soundtrack of Ennio Morricone (who else?) instantly setting the tone for the entire film, an uneasy mix of the absurd and the satirical. Meanwhile, on screen, a handsome man’s man (Gian Maria Volontè) in a smart cream suit is arriving at the apartment of a beautiful woman (Florinda Bolkan) who is clad in a kaftan and little else. “How are you going to kill me this time?” she purrs. Clearly this “killing” is all part of some sex game they play, he the killer, she the victim. … Read more

My Name Is Sara

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Manya aka Sara

My Name Is Sara also goes by the title The Occupation – two separate titles for one film setting out to tell two distinct stories. There’s another bit of splittage going on as well. It’s a film shot in Poland with a Polish cast and crew but everyone in it speaks in English, regardless of how well they can actually do that. Into the story, which is a true one, of a Jewish girl called Sara Guralnik escaping with her brother from a Polish ghetto in 1942 and then trying to make it through the rest of the war while hiding out inside the borders of neighbouring Ukraine – there are the Nazis, … Read more

Scenes from a Marriage

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Johan and Marianne in bed

Time has robbed Ingmar Bergman’s film Scenes from a Marriage of some of its force but even so, if a forensic examination of a happy marriage’s collapse is what you’re looking for, it’s never been done better than it was here. I’m talking about the 1974 movie version, not the original 6x45minute TV mini-series it was cut down from. TV was what Scenes from a Marriage was made for, and also ensured that Bergman’s film wasn’t eligible for any Oscar action (one of the many nonsensical nose/face strictures which the Academy has been forced to back down on over the years). Because it was “TV first” and had aired the previous year, it … Read more

Top Gun: Maverick

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Maverick in the cockpit

Top Gun: Maverick comes such a long time after the original film – 30something years – that a quick introductory “previously on Top Gun” wouldn’t go amiss. Instead, new director Joseph Kosinski (who worked with Tom Cruise on Oblivion) puts us at ease with an opening sequence that’s a homage to Tony Scott, director of the original Top Gun – machines and processes fetished, a high tech something in silhouette, steam escaping from somewhere. A racing motorbike on a long flat road. “Hell, yeh” masculinity. Long lenses. Heat shimmers. It’s a “previously on Top Gun” as a mood board. And then we’re in to a story that wastes no time in letting us … Read more

Summer Window

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August and Juliane

When not co-creating, -writing and -directing the glorious Babylon Berlin TV series, Henk Handloegten likes to make films like Summer Window (Fenster zum Sommer), dramas that come front-loaded with a chunk of fantasy. The fantasy isn’t what his films are about, it’s more of a come-on, luring in the sceptical, who might find that they’ve lingered longer with his style of humane drama than they expected. In Good Bye Lenin!, which Handloegten co-wrote, the fantasy was more oblique, existing only in the mind of its East German characters, who were playing a gigantic game of make-believe with their frail mother, recently awake after a coma, in which the Berlin Wall hadn’t fallen and … Read more

Good Luck to You, Leo Grande

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Leo and Nancy in bed

Good Luck to You, Leo Grande is a film about a middle aged woman hiring a young stud for impersonal hotel sex. Things get talky rather than saucy (that stuff is going on off-screen). So much so that you can almost imagine watching it with your mother. Your Mother May Vary. It’s a stage piece, really, a two-hander that feels expressly written for that clever, dithery, diffident, endlessly self-unpromoting British character Emma Thompson has been playing for what seems like aeons. Nanny McPhee gets her bits out. Nancy, not Nanny, since Thompson plays Nancy Stokes (possibly not her real name), a recently widowed ex-teacher whose blameless life of service to her husband, children … Read more

In My Mind

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Patrick McGoohan and Chris Rodley in 1984

In My Mind is a close relative of one of those Nick Broomfield documentaries where, instead of making a film about his original subject, Broomfield tells the story of how he tried, but failed, to get his man or woman (see Tracking Down Maggie, about failing to get an interview with Margaret Thatcher, or Kurt and Courtney, in which he chased Courtney Love, to her increasing irritation). The person in question here is Patrick McGoohan and the film-maker is Chris Rodley, who in 1983 was sent to LA by Britain’s Channel 4 to film some interviews with McGoohan for an upcoming documentary about the cult 1960s TV series The Prisoner, which Channel 4 … Read more

Jellyfish Eyes

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Masashi and his F.R.I.E.N.D

Jellyfish Eyes starts out looking like a cute ET story and winds up being more a rampage-and-destrcution, Godzilla kind of thing. In between it gets most of the big things right. It’s Japanese, from 2013, and is the only feature film so far directed by Takashi Murakami, who is more a TV producer, though he has directed a number of shorts, among them promos for Billy Eilish and Kanye West, both obviously fans of Murakami’s style of animation. Jellyfish Eyes is not an animation. Not entirely, anyway. It’s a live-action story of a kid with no daddy (how often do kids stories feature absent dads?) who moves to a new school/town/life with his … Read more

The Lost Daughter

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Peter Sarsgaard and Jessie Buckley

There’s a lot of misdirection in The Lost Daughter, starting with the title, but to go into exactly where the misdirection lies and what it consists of is to ruin the entire film. It’s an adaptation of an Elena Ferrante novel, which is a bit of an unusual departure in itself, because for all the massive popularity of Ferrante right now, there have been very few screen adaptations of her work – before this only two movies in 1995 and 2005, and a highly regarded Italian TV series (about to enter its fourth season, as I type). The success of The Lost Daughter – Oscar nominations for the two lead actors, plus another … Read more