Steve

The Money Pit

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Tom Hanks

Barely ever really funny, The Money Pit is something of a slapstick classic all the same, a triumph of a kind of Hollywood film-making and playing that’s so precise that you have to admire it… even though you’ll probably not laugh. The scenario is lifted wholesale from the 1948 comedy Mr Blandings Builds His Dream House, which starred Cary Grant and Myrna Loy as the couple who buy a doer-upper and realise there’s more to do up than they can possibly manage. Here it’s Tom Hanks and Shelley Long as the pair who leapt before they looked. Hanks, two years after his breakthrough in Splash, is in his high comedy phase. Two years later … Read more

Servants

by
Juraj and Michal

Servants is a story about the collusion between the Catholic Church and the Czechoslovakian StB (its secret service) in the days of the Cold War. It’s also a beautifully made film, full of arresting cinematography and a soundtrack so haunting that it alone makes the film worth catching. The opening shot, of a car seen from behind gliding down a night-time road through an industrial landscape, immediately places us in noirish thriller territory. This is a world where bad things happen at night, unsmiling men stalk the landscape, bodies are dumped by roadsides, cigarettes are smoked, drink is drunk and belted overcoats are worn. Women don’t have an awful lot to do. It … Read more

Asylum

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Disruptive David and fellow inmate

There are two films called Asylum from 1972. One is typical of its era – a compendium horror produced by the Amicus studio, directed by Hammer regular Roy Ward Baker, written by Robert Bloch, of Psycho fame, and starring Peter Cushing. And so is the other, a fly-on-the-wall documentary taking seriously a countercultural moment at full flood. This is a review of the latter, just to disappoint the lovers of the lurid, a sober look inside a therapeutic community based in a small house in the East End of London, run by Dr RD Laing and his fellows in the Philadelphia Association, where clinicians and patients interacted together in a community in what … Read more

Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)

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Mavis Staples and Mahalia Jackson

Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised), what a treasure trove of spine-tingling musical goodies this film is. “Directed” by Questlove, whose role is really more curatorial and editorial, it’s a compendium of highlights from a series of six free concerts held on Sundays in Harlem from June to August 1969. Billed at the time as The Black Woodstock, after legendary festival which was being held upstate at around the same time. There were around 40 hours of performances recorded, and most of it has lain abandoned in a basement ever since it was shot by producer Hal Tulchin. Tulchin’s plans to get it a wider distribution came to … Read more

Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn

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Emilia in face mask

If the prolific Romanian director Radu Jude’s Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn does nothing else, it wins its lead actress an award for bravery. Its opening scenes feature Katia Pascariu in full-on sex with her screen husband, the pair of them putting it all on tape – her swinging tits, his erect cock, her back end, her entreaties for him to stick it in etc. Pascariu was last seen, high irony, playing a nun in Cristian Mungiu’s bleak 2012 drama Beyond the Hills. What neither the fully consensual Emilia (Pascariu) nor Eugen know is that the strictly-for-home-consumption “tape” is going to wind up on PornHub, and stay there, in spite of their … Read more

Decade of Fire

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Bronx kid surrounded by devastation

Decade of Fire is a mix of the dispassionate investigative documentary and the more personalised Who Do You Think You Are? style of “one person’s journey into the archive”. It works, not always and not entirely, but it works. Vivian Vazquez is our guide into the history of the South Bronx and the epidemic of fires it experienced, which accompanied and accelerated its shift from buzzy inner-city neighbourhood to burnt-out no-go ghetto. The Bronx became a shorthand for urban decay. The official view has always been that the fires were set by the residents, who seemed engaged in some personal and collective death wish. But who burns down their own house? Vazquez, who … Read more

Pig

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The pig and Nicolas Cage

“John Wick with a Pig” is how Pig, starring Nicolas Cage, is often described. Fair enough, even if that only really works as a shorthand if you’ve got a big bag of “buts” handy. Admittedly, the plot is strangely similiar – loner loses favourite animal and goes on a payback jag. But though Cage and Keanu Reeves are both boomers from 1964, the similarities end there – Cage is a “big” actor embracing the extra texture that age brings, Reeves is more minimalist and doing his best to ignore it. Either way, this is a vastly entertaining odd-couple comedy served straight. And that’s another thing – this is a buddy movie, whereas the … Read more

The Painted Bird

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Joska asleep on a cart while a woman hoes

A screen adaptation of Polish-born Jerzy Kosiński’s novel The Painted Bird probably should have been made before 2019. “Of all the remarkable fiction that emerged from World War II, nothing stands higher than Jerzy Kosiński’s The Painted Bird,” wrote Jonathan Yardley in The Miami Herald in a typical rave when the book first appeared in 1965. When it turned out that the book wasn’t based on Kosiński’s own personal experiences, as he had claimed, and that he’d pulled off a remarkable literary hoax, sentiment reversed sharply. Decades later there were claims that other books by Kosiński – like Being There (which was turned into a 1979 film starring Peter Sellers) – were largely … Read more

Eighteen

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Inside the car with The Goat, Jeni, Sonya and Nick

The fresh and the familiar collide to good effect in Eighteen (or 18, if you like), a coming-of-age tale set on the Bulgarian equivalent of Prom Night, when a near-lifetime of schooling comes to an end and old friends stare at each other and at the future, suddenly seeing both in a different light. Being set in Bulgaria gives the whole undertaking its most obvious injection of freshness, but the foursome we meet, Nick (Martin Dimitrov) and Jeni (Milena Ermenkova), Sonya (Desislava Kasabova) and The Goat (Teodor Hristov) – he alternately acts the goat and gets people’s goat (maybe the expression carries over into Bulgarian?) – are familiar enough. Nick and Jeni belong in … Read more

Deerskin

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Jean Dujardin and Adèle Haenel

Deerskin is a film about the film-making process, or a film about a man in the grip of a massive self-delusion, or one about the making of a serial killer, take your pick. It’s a comedy and it made me laugh several times, often simply because it is Jean Dujardin as the man at the centre of it all, an actor with funny bones – at his Oscar acceptance speech for The Artist, he name-checked both Laurence Olivier and Benny Hill. Here’s a bare-bones plot – man buys an elaborately fringed deerskin jacket and finds himself so taken with how he looks in it that it changes his character. He starts “acting” like … Read more