Steve

Robot Dreams

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Dog and Robot

Imaginative, sweet and brilliantly observed, Robot Dreams is a deceptively simple animation set in an alternate New York of the 1980s, where animals rather than people crowd the city streets, delis and subways, and a lonely dog living on his own decides, on a whim, to buy one of those flatpack robots he’s seen advertised on the TV. Before long he’s screwing together the bits and pieces delivered to his door. Eventually he hits the “on” button and, after a creak, lo and behold his robot rises, winks, smiles and the two of them fall almost instantly in love. In one of those romantic montage sequences, out they go into New York. Hot … Read more

Little Murders

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Elliott Gould and Marcia Rodd in a car

1971’s Little Murders gets the jump on Annie Hall by a handful of years. Woody Allen’s 1977 film was originally going to be called Anhedonia (an echo remains in his ultimate title) and was about a guy who couldn’t feel anything, which is what the condition of anhedonia is. Little Murders takes the same idea in a different direction – bleaker, less digressive and only funny in a weird way. Originally Jean-Luc Godard was going to direct but instead Alan Arkin ended up behind the camera, honouring Godard with a New Wave-style approach to the material – fast edits, scenes crashed into and out of, nothing too fancy in terms of lighting, as if … Read more

National Anthem

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Sky on horseback

A good way of coming at National Anthem, Luke Gilford’s debut feature, is to know a little bit about his own life. He grew up in Colorado, the son of a member of the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association. Getting older, he became uneasy at, his words, how homophobic and patriarchal the rodeo was, and yet he still loved its mythical take on America. He started wondering if there were other people like him, who loved the Americana but wanted to come at the rodeo from a different angle. It turned out there were – the International Gay Rodeo Association. Gilford became a photographer and eventually produced a photobook called National Anthem – cover … Read more

100 Years of… The Gold Rush

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The Lone Prospector fights a dog for a bone

Charlie Chaplin’s most famous film, the one he wanted to be remembered by, is The Gold Rush. It was not only sensational then but it’s amazing how well it holds up now. Fashionable though it is to be slightly down on Chaplin these days, The Gold Rush is the one doubters should see – inventive, dramatic and funny, it’s well made enough to convince all but the most prejudiced. I’d urge the Criterion version on you if you’re going to shell out for a physical copy. It contains the 1925 silent original and also the 1942 re-release, which Chaplin re-edited, rescored and overdubbed with a narration (an approximation of newsreel bombast done by … Read more

Vermiglio

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Lucia and Pietro about to kiss

Done a bit faster and with less attention to detail, Vermiglio would be a soap opera. Its story is pure soap – secret assignation, love, betrayal, jealousy, closely guarded secrets and the warm embrace/stultifying smother of the family environment. Maura Delpero’s film is set in northern Italy in 1944 where a deserter from the army – sensing war is over – is hiding out with a large family up in their barn on the hill. He falls for one of the daughters, and she for him, and in the natural scheme of things they get close. Then… disaster. And spoilers. Pietro (Giuseppe De Domenico), a dark and handsome Sicilian, woos Lucia (Martina Scrinzi), though he … Read more

Capricorn One

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Sam Waterston, Josh Brolin and OJ Simpson as the astronauts on the run

According to conspiracy theorists, Kubrick shot the Moon landings. Peter Hyams is in some respects a better candidate. His Capricorn One is all about a faked journey into space, and is undoubtedly the inspiration behind many of the whisperings about Nasa making the whole thing up. Why does Kubrick get name-checked so much more often than Hyams then? Probably because Kubrick is a better film-maker, even though the space sections of his 2001: A Space Odyssey look far more obviously bogus than Hyams’s later mission-to-Mars movie. 1977’s Capricorn One is also a bit of a mess, whereas 2001, for all the messing around, is not. Hyams does his best work early on and … Read more

In the Summers

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Violetta, Dad and Eva sit in the sun

This tricky but not tricksy feature debut for writer/director Alessandra Lacorazza Samudio is a lightly dramatised account of the summers spent with her sister visiting her dad in New Mexico. Tricky because it’s a film about a lack rather than a presence, a failure to connect on both sides – though both dad and the kids do score points for trying. Done sometimes as snapshots, at other times as more extended scenes from a life, the story is told through the eyes of the two sisters who arrive in Las Cruces every year, to stay with dad while their mother back home in California – never seen or heard – does whatever footloose … Read more

Play Dirty

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Captain Douglas disguised as a German

“Life is goddam black and I photograph life.” Andre De Toth’s thumbnail manifesto is perfectly illustrated by Play Dirty, his last film and one of his ugliest. Critics hated it, though you sense it was the nihilism of the movie they really had an issue with rather than the various issues they cited. War is hell and it turns men into beasts, that’s the message here. It is in essence The Dirty Dozen but dirtier, a not-so-playful Second World War adventure in the sands of North Africa, where a prissy cravat-wearing Brit, played by Michael Caine, is seconded by a cynical top brass (who expect everyone to die) to lead a crack unit … Read more

Despicable Me 4

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Gru presents his ID for the Anti-Villain League

Are you still here? That’s how I approached Despicable Me 4, an intellectual property that had done all its emotional work already in the first movie – how super-super villain Gru became a decent sort – but somehow miraculously re-purposed itself and sailed on to franchise glory. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this fourth iteration is that everyone involved seems to still give a stuff. The story is zippy, the voice cast is committed, the animation is lively and colourful, it has a good soundtrack. It’s busy, too busy really, but it’s still pulling out the stops, being inventive when it could just ride along on its own coat tails. You could start … Read more

100 Years of… The Plastic Age

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Hugh and Cynthia in a car

There was barely any plastic around in 1925 when The Plastic Age debuted. “Plastic” in this context has its original sense of something easily moulded – “rendering the material more plastic”, my dictionary offers as an example. That “material” in this case is a young man and his “Age” is the reason he’s so biddable, labile, impressionable, easily influenced – see your thesaurus for more synonyms. Donald Keith plays the dude, Hugh, a young man off to college where, his parents hope, he’ll keep the family end up and fulfil himself as a sportsman of track and field (no one at this college seems to do any studying). But instead of knuckling down … Read more