Steve

Materna

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Lindsay Burdge and Jade Eshete on the subway

Not so much a film as four shorts held together by a framing device, Materna looks at women through the prism of the family – the mother, the daughter, the sister, the neice. All four stories and women are united for the briefest of moments on one of those New York subway journeys made unendurable by a male asshole running his mouth. First the mother, Jean (Kate Lyn Sheil), a mo-cap artist aged about 35 being encouraged by her own mother to either get a man pronto or get her eggs frozen. Since part of Jean’s daily routine seems to consist of throwing up, her mother’s prayers already look to have been answered, … Read more

Something to Remind Me

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Nina Hoss and André Hennicke

It’s called Toter Mann in German, the literal translation of which is Dead Man, but instead of calliing it that the distributors went with the possibly even more ironic Something to Remind Me for the English-language release of this mystery thriller, the first collaboration between writer/director Christian Petzold and actor Nina Hoss. A TV movie is how it was described in 2001 when it aired in Germany, but these days that fairly nonsensical distinction has dropped away – it’s a movie, and a highly cinematic one at that. It hasn’t got the budget of the big screen movie but the thriller genre fits the bill, as does the atmosphere, sleek and chilly. Petzold, … Read more

The Twentieth Century

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WL Mackenzie King sniffs a boot

Where to begin with The Twentieth Century, a mad bit of nonsense that’s initially exasperating but eventually works so hard at what it’s doing that your resistance might start to crumble. We’re in the realm of the camp pastiche right from the opening colorized 1930s-style credits. Those dispensed with, the movies settles down to tell the story of WL Mackenzie King, Canada’s most celebrated prime minister – three terms of office from the early 1920s to late 1940s. Forget those details lifted from WLMK’s Wikipedia page. They’re only confusing. If there’s any basis of fact at all in writer/director Matthew Rankin’s film, it’s been so decorated with chintz, frills and flounces that it’s … Read more

Undine

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Jacob Matschenz and Paule Beer in a swimming pool

So, an Undine. It’s a mythical water nymph, mentioned by Paracelsus, the Renaissance physician, but you won’t learn that directly from Christian Petzold’s latest drama, an increasingly bizarre and dislocated story of love suffused with magical realist moments that make no sense at all… unless you realise that the titular Undine (Paula Beer) is a version of the mythical creature who fell in love with a human. This Undine is a pencil-skirted guide to historical Berlin. She’s fresh out of a relationship with a guy she thought was the one, now propelled by fate into another one when a fish tank explodes and she and a man she’s just met (Franz Rogowski) are … Read more

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