Steve

Hope Gap

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Annette Bening and Bill Nighy

About as unfashionable as they come, Hope Gap has two and a half great actors in it and tells a tender story with great compassion. It’s an adaptation of writer/director William Nicholson’s play The Retreat from Moscow and though Nicholson throws in scenes set on the cliffs and by the sea as often as possible, in an attempt to cinematify things, this is obviously a chamber piece that doesn’t in any case need them. Instead it gets its power from the gulf between what is said and what is unsaid, and the interaction of the two. The two great actors are Annette Bening and Bill Nighy, playing a long married couple called Grace … Read more

The Love of Jeanne Ney

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Jeanne and Andreas

The Love of Jeanne Ney is one of those torrid love stories told against a backdrop of roiling conflict. Or that’s what it looks like at the outset. But by the end it’s become more like a showcase for everything the great Austrian director Georg Wilhelm Pabst could do – all the genres in all the styles. By this point in his career, Pabst had given Greta Garbo her first starring role two years before in 1925’s Joyless Street (aka Die freudlose Gasse). Two years later he would turn Louise Brooks into a global icon with Pandora’s Box. If Jeanne Ney was a bit of bait designed to lure Hollywood into hiring him, … Read more

Possession

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Isabelle Adjani and Sam Neill

Gird your loins, and probably best to stap your vitals while you’re at it, because it’s Possession, the 1981 movie showcasing one of the most remarkable displays of unhinged acting you’re ever likely to see, with Isabelle Adjani doing the frothing up, and leaving co-star Sam Neill trailing in her wake. This odd film got caught up in the video nasty debacle in the UK, where it was seen as a horror movie and got banned outright. A similarly negative outcome awaited it in the US, where over 30 minutes of footage was cut to make the film suitable for midnight movie audiences, destroying it in the process. It’s not a horror film, … Read more

Le Deuxième Souffle

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Gu in a car pointing a gun

The title of Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1966 gangster drama Le Deuxième Souffle is often translated as The Second Wind, though The Last Gasp would also work pretty well, since it’s a story about a career criminal breaking out of jail and trying to get out of France with his woman. Stuck for cash, the fugitive takes part in a “one last job” heist, which does indeed turn out to be his one last job. Lino Ventura plays the criminal Gu, short for Gustave, so ruthless a character that Melville puts up a disclaimer before the film that he personally does not condone any of the actions that the audience are about to see on … Read more

Adieu les cons aka Bye Bye Morons

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Suze peers from behind a tree

The French comedy Adieu Les Cons (Bye Bye Morons in English) is dedicated to Monty Python’s Terry Jones, who died while it was being made, and also features a blink-and-miss-it cameo by Terry Gilliam, another Python. Given that the film’s director, co-writer and star, Albert Dupontel, is a big fan of the British comedy troupe, you might expect this film, which did incredibly well at the César Awards (the French Oscars) to be full of Pythonesque silliness, absurdity and gentle mocking of the staid middle class. Yes… but mostly no. It stars the ever-brilliant Virginie Efira, a still centre of calm as the mayhem escalates, as Suze, a hairdresser who’s just been told that … Read more

Arrebato

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José and Pedro

Arrebato (Rapture, in English) is one of a new wave of films that poured out of Spain after the death of the Fascist dictator Generalissimo Franco in 1975. It appeared in 1979 and was directed by Ivan Zulueta, who like his friend Pedro Almodóvar, was eager to explore all the areas of transgression that Franco’s jackboot had blocked. Sex and drugs and rock’n’roll is the rough idea, and since Zulueta was himself a junkie, as were a lot of people working on his film, Arrebato is a great way of getting the full Movida Madrileña experience, as the post-Franco rush of naughtiness was called, if you’re in a hurry. In fact Rush might … Read more

Wild Indian

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Makwa as the grown-up Michael

Wild Indian starts out looking like it’s going to be a film about a troubled kid, abused at home, struggling at school, who suddenly takes matters into his own hands and does something heinous. It turns out to be a film about the two grown-ups involved in that heinous event – the guy who did it, and the friend who was there when it happened. We first meet Makwa (Phoenix Wilson) and Ted-o (Julian Gopal), a pair of Native American kids cusping on puberty. Makwa isn’t having too good a time of it – beaten at home, bullied at school, unable to get the girl he fancies – and in a moment of … Read more

Loving Vincent

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Vincent in the style of Van Gogh

It’s likely that nothing is ever going to knock Loving Vincent off the top spot when it comes to films about the paintings of Vincent Van Gogh. Whether it relegates 1956’s Lust for Life – which starred Kirk Douglas as the tortured artist – into second place as a biopic is another mattter entirely. It’s a Polish movie with British/Irish actors in most of the key roles and an unashamed Citizen Kane structure. Douglas Booth takes the investigative role as Armand Roulin, the rough postmaster’s son trying to return a letter sent by Vincent to his brother Theo, and in the process going from one person to another, talking out of each details … Read more

Power, Profit and Populism: The Battle for Hard Brexit

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The Houses of Parliament

At the Raindance film festival, London, UK, 27 October–6 November 2021 The UK voted to leave the EU in 2016. Power, Profit and Populism: The Battle for Hard Brexit tells the story of how the answer to a seemingly straightforwardly worded referendum question was hijacked by invisible forces. “Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?” was the question, and the campaign to persuade the electorate to vote to leave was largely fought on the basis that the country would be able to “take back control” of various competencies, like its borders, its fishing and farming, while retaining access to the EU’s single market.   … Read more

The Man Who Knew Too Much

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Bob consoles wife Jill

Here’s the original 1934 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much, the thriller Alfred Hitchcock would remake in 1956 with James Stewart and Doris Day in the lead roles. He later said this first version was “the work of a talented amateur, and the second was made by a professional.” However, ever a master of misdirection, it’s actually the first one that Hitchcock preferred. He found the second too polished. Unlike the second, this is a very British affair, with Leslie Banks and Edna Best as the married couple whose holiday in St Moritz is interrupted when a friend is shot and killed in front of them (in one of the most … Read more