Steve

100 Years of… The Sheikh

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Rudolph Valentino as the Sheikh

Rudolph Valentino had two big films in 1921. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, by far the biggest grossing film of the year, was the one that made him a star. But The Sheikh was even more important. It made Valentino so famous that we still talk of him today, long after the auras of fellow stars like Norma Talmadge and Wallace Reid have faded. The Four Horsemen gave Valentino the “Latin lover” tag but The Sheikh made it stick, something that Valentino – striving to have a varied career – struggled against before bowing to the inevitable in 1926 with Son of the Sheikh. In an intense but short time at the … Read more

Judas and the Black Messiah

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Daniel Kaluuya as Fred Hampton

Part history lesson, part undercover thriller, Judas and the Black Messiah takes it as read that the audience knows the bare-bones facts about the Black Panther movement. And just in case they don’t, there are three powerful performers in key roles to help bounce over the gaps. These are the shapeshifting Daniel Kaluuya as Black Panther “Chairman” Fred Hampton, dead at 21, killed while asleep in nothing less than a state assassination. LaKeith Stanfield as Bill O’Neal, the mole who fed information about the Panthers to the police. And Jesse Plemons as Roy Mitchell, the FBI handler running O’Neal. We meet O’Neal before we meet the Panthers – he’s an audacious car thief … Read more

The Dig

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Basil on the sofa, Mrs Pretty kneeling on the floor

The Dig re-imagines the events around a discovery so fabulous it needs no re-imagining – the excavation of the Sutton Hoo hoard. First unearthed in the 1930s, and originally thought to be Viking, the hoard turned out to be much older, Anglo Saxon, and eventually yielded up remarkable treasures made of gold, plus examples of everyday household objects that rewrote our understanding of the time, and perhaps most eye-catching of all, a 6th-century ship, buried in a mound as a funeral barque for its owner. You don’t actually learn an awful lot about the actual treasures of Sutton Hoo in The Dig, though the skeletal frame of the part-excavated ship acts as a visual … Read more

Greenland

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The family driving to save their lives

Gerard Butler is a fine actor capable of great nuance, a line usually guaranteed to get a laugh. No, but he is. It’s just that he’s chosen the action-guy route in films like the (Olympus, London, Angel) Has Fallen series rather than the sensitive thespian path he could have taken after 2004’s Frankie (plenty of nuanced Butler there). Greenland gives us a lot of one sort of Butler and enough of the other to suggest that the actor is weighing up a return to actual acting, rather than continuing exclusively to pull Action Man poses. Because Greenland is a movie with nuance and some psychological depth wrapped up in a very familiar disaster … Read more

Palm Springs

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Cristin Milioti and Andy Samberg floating in a pool

So great is the Groundhog Day idea that Palm Springs can squeeze a whole other film out of it… and there’s enough conceptual space for it to be great too. Writer Andy Siara knows he can’t get away with a straight retread and so tweaks the Groundhog Day idea a bit. When we first meet Palm Springs’s Bill Murray – Brooklyn Nine Nine and Saturday Night Live guy Andy Samberg – he’s already inside his own endless time loop. Siara takes things one stage further by imagining that Andie MacDowell and Chris Elliott (the GD camera guy) also somehow made it into the loop too, with all the possible extra complications that would have. … Read more

Two of Us

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Madeleine and Nina

I was intending to watch Two of Us (aka Deux) a few weeks ago and in fact did watch a film called Two of Us, just not this one. That one was a zombie movie set in Thailand. This one is a tense human drama set in Paris. Do not confuse. Although both feature a pair of women in the central roles, the females in the Thai movie were young women. The women in question here are both pensioners, a pair of secretive lesbians who have lived next door to each other for decades. To be more precise they have both lived in the apartment of Madeleine (Martine Chevallier), while Nina (Barbara Sukowa) … Read more

Lad: A Yorkshire Story

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Alan Gibson and Bretten Lord

When Dan Hartley was a lad, growing up in Yorkshire, he struck up a relationship, a friendship, with Al Boughen, a park ranger working for the Yorkshire Dales National Park. Lad: A Yorkshire Story, dedicated to Boughen, who died in 2010, is a tribute from the older Hartley, now a writer and director, to the man who mentored him at a crucial stage of his life. In Hartley’s film Dan is now called Tom and is played with real charm by Bretten Lord (bringing to mind another Yorkshire lad, David Bradley, in Ken Loach’s 1969 film Kes). Tom is a 13-year-old with a life on a familiar course – hanging with his older brother … Read more

Klaus

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Jesper and Klaus

When is the best time to watch Klaus, an animated film aimed at the 2019 Christmas market? In February 2021, obviously. Though why not? Here in London there’s snow on the ground and the coronavirus is keeping a lot of people indoors still. Just add a piece of dense fruit cake and a glass of decent whisky and absolutely why not? It’s the story of how Santa Claus became Santa Claus, or Father Christmas if you like, since the two characters are now almost one. Not the Santa story as we already know it. Actually, come to think of it, do we already know it? Whether we think we do or we’re sure … Read more