Steve

Small Axe: Mangrove

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The Mangrove Nine in the dock

Small Axe: Mangrove is the first of a series of five standalone films made for the BBC by Steve McQueen. The umbrella title takes its name from the reggae song by Bob Marley (or Lee Perry, depending on who you ask) and though it was originally aimed at the big-name Jamaican music producers muscling everyone else out of the market, it translates perfectly to any underdog story. Mangrove is that story – 1968, Notting Hill in London, before it became the Notting Hill of Hugh Grant/Julia Roberts fame, was a downmarket inner-city area full of fine houses left to rot, crammed with too many tenants, many of them from the West Indies. It … Read more

Jerichow

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Benno Fürmann, Nina Hoss and Hilmi Sözer

Jerichow is the fourth collaboration between director Christian Petzold and actor Nina Hoss – both names a guarantee of at least a degree of excellence. But before we get there – just quickly skimming through Petzold’s entries on the IMDB (research!) to see which films actually comprise the somewhat disputed “ghost trilogy” (Petzold and Hoss’s first three collaborations), I noticed that someone has added notes to a number of Petzold’s films, under the Trivia section. How closely one film resembles Hitchcock’s Vertigo, another Claude Chabrol’s Que la Bête Meure, yet another Sidney Lumet’s Running On Empty, and so on. And how in all of these cases there is no reference back to the … Read more

Persona

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Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson

Ingmar Bergman beat Mr Spock to the mind meld. Persona, Bergman’s masterwork about one person’s identity merging with another’s, debuted in August 1966. The Vulcan psychic control technique first saw light of cathode ray in November of the same year in the Star Trek episode Dagger of the Mind. We’ve heard plenty from Mr Spock in the intervening decades, increasingly less from the once intensely voguish Bergman. But for anyone wondering where to go to get the full Bergman hit in one short, sharp dose, Persona is that place. The film follows a famous actress Elisabet (played by Liv Ullmann), suddenly an elective mute, and her nurse Alma (Bibi Andersson) on a journey … Read more

The Head Hunter

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Christopher Rygh as the lone warrior

The Head Hunter is three quarters of the way to greatness as a high-concept fantasy horror movie. Fans of all things runic will love the beards and dirt, though they may balk at the length – it’s only 72 minutes long. If you’re in the market for a doorstop, there’s always Game of Thrones to rewatch. Also, here be no dragons whatsoever, so be warned. But in the shape of Christopher Rygh as its Nordic warrior hero it has an excellent star. Rygh is stout of limb, bright of eye and splendid of beard. It’s hard to tell whether he’s a great actor since there’s so little dialogue, but he passes muster in … Read more

Wet Job

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Angela Browne and David Woodward

Wet Job is a 1981 TV movie and the last outing for Edward Woodward’s Callan, the touchiest secret operative British TV ever produced. Callan is a version of Harry Palmer of Ipcress File fame, a working class lad forced out of the army for insubordination and then picked up by the secret service because of his special set of skills. If Palmer was designed as the anti-007, Callan is another rung down on the ladder – there’s no glamour to the man, and he has absolutely no pride in his work, which is killing people. Callan is on TV rather than the big screen too. Palmer reported to a dowdy office front; Callan’s … Read more

American Utopia

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David Byrne, dancers and musicians on stage

David Byrne’s American Utopia show, essentially a greatest hits package plus plus, was getting towards the end of its run in 2019 when Spike Lee arrived to film it. Part of Byrne’s wider Reasons to Be Cheerful project aimed at spreading good vibes, it had become, like Bruce Springsteen’s Broadway shows in 2017, a must-see event by that point. Both Byrne and Lee are New Yorkers and there’s a definite Big Apple sensibility to this show – smart, dry, liberal, culturally catholic. Another way to see it is as Stop Making Sense Part II. That, if you remember, was Jonathan Demme’s great 1984 concert movie of Talking Heads in their pomp, and kicked … Read more

What We Wanted

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Niklas and Alice with their neighbour's daughter

What We Wanted (Was Wir Wollten in the original German) is the story of a late-30s Austrian couple who signed up to be together, have kids, the whole kit and caboodle, trying to renegotiate their relationship after their fourth round of failed IVF treatment. We meet them just as they’re getting the bad news in the IVF clinic. But their other problem, and what this exquisitely crafted film is about, is that they have never really had “the conversation”, never really hashed out, possibly in horrible recriminatory detail, why they can’t have kids, who’s to “blame” and where they go from here – what they wanted, what they want now and what they … Read more

La Llorona

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María Mercedes Coroy

La Llorona is a figure in Mexican folklore, a tragic ghostly beauty dressed in white clothes who haunts the world she once lived in, having drowned first her own children and then herself. You can find a faint echo of La Llorona in the Wilkie Collins novel The Woman in White, but though The Woman in White has been turned into several movies, TV series and an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, it’s never really taken hold in the anglosphere quite the same way as La Llorona has with Spanish speakers – in fact there were two other movies based on the myth in production when this La Llorona debuted. I mention all that because … Read more

Stories from the Chestnut Woods

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Massimo De Francovich as Mario

Stories from the Chestnut Woods could so easily have been a misery memoir or poverty porn but thankfully it’s not. Instead director/writer Gregor Bozic has crafted an elegiac film of real beauty and poignancy. It’s set on the border where old Yugoslavia (now Slovenia) meets Italy, a region that’s been in decline for a long time and, judging by most of the houses and the people in them, has seen better days. The people who are left are either old, or they’re young and have a plan to get out quick and take advantage of the prosperity that’s transforming much of the rest of Europe in the post Second World War era. Mario … Read more

The Commuter

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Liam Neeson between two train carriages

Liam Neeson. A Very Particular Set of Skills. They’re back in The Commuter, in which everyone’s favourite geri-actioner gets physical… this time on a train. This is the fourth collaboration between Neeson and director Jaume Collet-Serra, after Unknown (Skills in Berlin), Non-Stop (Skills on a plane), Run All Night (Skills in New York) and now Skills on the way home from work. If it seems like there have been a lot more of these films than that, you’re probably also adding Taken (three of them) and Walk Among the Tombstones to the tally. They were directed by different people but also featured a gravelly, unsmiling Neeson being forced into a corner and then coming … Read more