Steve

The Green Knight

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The Green Knight

Sailing into the gap opened up by Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones, The Green Knight is the latest addition to the crowded medieval/supernatural genre and writer/director David Lowery’s latest experiment in giving a hot genre a cool treatment. It’s Dev Patel as Gawain (emphasis on the first syllable, not the second), the would-be knight who steps forward after pagan spirit creature the Green Knight gatecrashes Christmas festivities and demands that one of the assembled satisfy his challenge – take a free pop at me, but I require that in one year from today I do back to you whatever you are about to do to me. Gawain gives this film … Read more

Candyman

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Anthony looks in the mirro

Gory but not too scary, 2021’s Candyman is a direct sequel to 1992’s Candyman, which means it builds on the narrative and the lore of the first film rather than the 1995 and 1999 sequels. It also builds on the lore and narrative of Tony Todd’s Candyman, the first mainstream black horror whacko, someone to be pitched alongside Freddie Kruger or Leatherface in a nightmare beauty pageant. Clive Barker wrote the original story, The Forbidden, and set the action in rundown Liverpool. Bernard Rose relocated the whole thing to Cabrini-Green in rundown Chicago for the 1992 version he adapted and directed, reshaping the story to his liking – for example, in Barker’s version … Read more

The Avengers: Series 1, Episode 20 – Tunnel of Fear

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John Steed and David Keel

For a long time it was thought that only a couple of episodes from series one of The Avengers had survived. And then Tunnel of Fear turned up in a “private film collection”, as the press release guardedly puts it, swelling the number of complete episodes from two to a mighty three out of a possible 26. There’s about a third of the very first episode, Hot Snow, too – reviewed here. We might not have the full run of the season but with Tunnel of Fear we now have enough to get a sketchy impression of the direction of the show. Hot Snow in first position establishing David Keel (Ian Hendry) as a … Read more

Together

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James McAvoy squats in the kitchen

Together is a select member of a new genre – the Covid Drama – and sees Sharon Horgan back working again with Dennis Kelly. Together they co-wrote Pulling, the TV relationship comedy that made both their names. Kelly went on to create and write the TV conspiracy thriller Utopia and Horgan to co-write the popular comedy series Catastrophe. This time around he writes, she acts (though you can’t rule out the possibility that there’s a fair amount of improvising going on too). Flipping the actual experience of many people – who found that the whole Covid experience (particularly the lockdowns in the UK) caused their relationship to buckle – Together is a funny/angry examination of a married … Read more

1448 Love Among Us

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Pim and Pat's wedding ceremony

In the 2014 Thai film 1448 Love Among Us, both the “1448” and the “Us” of the title are significant, the former the section of the Thai penal code restricting marriage to heterosexual people and the latter an indicator that this film is very much a movie for domestic consumption. Even so, for drama lovers there’s enough in here to slake the thirst, while issue-seekers are more obviously catered for. The opening shot sets the tone – two pretty young women in bridal white getting married to each other, in a ceremony presided over by an official who has her reservations but who wishes Pim (Apinya Sakuljaroensuk) and Pat (Isabella Lete) well, as … Read more

Yes, God, Yes

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Alice masturbates

Yes, God, Yes – a funny title pithily catching the twin obsessions of this slight but sharp movie. Sex and god. It stars Natalia Dyer, who somehow has managed to fit this in alongside the nine other movies and 30-odd episodes of the Netflix show Stranger Things she’s appeared in over the last six years or so. She was about 24 when she made this, but the big eyes and slender frame mean she can just about get away with playing Alice, a teenager from a sheltered background grappling with the first stirrings of sexuality at the Catholic school that seems almost unnaturally fixated on the carnal. Coming of agers with storylines that … Read more

Cryptozoo

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At the cryptozoo

Independent, hand-drawn, adult animation is rare, as Sundance programmer Charlie Sextro said at the premiere of Cryptozoo, which puts Dash Shaw’s busy and quirky adventure in pretty much the same category as its subject matter. A cryptid, an early intertitle card informs us, is a creature whose existence is unsubstantiated, or who remains hidden. As in a cryptic crossword, you have to look beyond the surface to see what is really there. And a cryptozoo is where our hero, Lauren (voiced by Lake Bell) is employed as a kind of Indiana Jones swashbuckler, travelling the world to bring crypto-animals like the velue, the gorgon and the karzelek back to the zoo, where they’ll … Read more

Cry Macho

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Clint Eastwood and Eduardo Minett

Cry Macho is the latest instalment in the Clint Eastwood series of movies you could loosely call the “old guy’s last hurrah”. Like Gran Torino and The Mule, it’s a moment to be reminded of past glories as well as be entertained, all the while marvelling at at Eastwood’s remarkable career and long life. Clint Eastwood was 90 when he was making this film and at an age when many people are being spoonfed, he is starring, directing and producing. He also writes some of the instrumental music. He appears in every scene. Like most late-period Eastwood movies starring the man himself, this is as much about the Eastwood myth behind as well … Read more

The Boy Who Turned Yellow

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John turns yellow

The Boy Who Turned Yellow is interesting for all sorts of reasons. Released in 1972, it was the final film of both director Michael Powell and screenwriter Emeric Pressburger, the powerhouse duo who’d been responsible for some of the UK’s most innovative, technically brilliant, thematically complex and entertaining films. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, A Matter of Life and Death, Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes are probably the biggest successes in a partnership that lasted from 1939’s The Spy in Black (“the most exciting spy melodrama since the advent of the Second World War,” opined the New York Times) to 1957’s Ill Met by Moonlight aka Night Ambush (Powell himself … Read more

Les Misérables

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Cops Pento, Chris and Gwada

The title Les Misérables is now so associated with the musical that it’s often hard to remember that it was originally a novel by Victor Hugo, and an immensely significant one at that. Surely, bearing the book, the musical and various film adaptations of both in mind, writer director Ladj Ly must have had qualms about calling his film that. But he went ahead anyway and here’s the result, a bravado piece of dramatic film-making that not only justifies Ly’s use of the title but also validates his chutzpah. Hugo’s masterpiece often translates as The Miserables, The Wretched, The Dispossessed and The Wretched Poor, and Ly finds the modern equivalents of Hugo bread-stealing … Read more