Review

Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974

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Miyuki in a bath with other bargirls' babies

These days, we’re used to a documentarian being an integral part of their own documentary. But Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974 got there decades before the likes of Nick Broomfield or Michael Moore. Here, Kazuo Hara turns his camera on himself and his relationships and charts everything he sees. As an idea of what to expect, look at each of the words in the title – it is extreme, very private etc etc… and it all takes place in 1974. Very shaky, very handheld, very confrontational and quite possibly not all of it entirely unstaged, the film is essentially a chronicle of film-maker Hara’s relationship with a bar girl called Miyuki Takeda. … Read more

Tuner

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Ruthie and Niki face to face

Tuner looks like it’s going to be a cracking drama but it hits a bum note early on, ironic in a film about a guy whose job it is to make pianos ring true. Dustin Hoffman is prominently billed, seems to be prominent dramatically too, but has been all but retired from the movie after about 15 minutes. What was shaping up to be enjoyable display of give-and-take, catch-and-release, tag-team acting between Hoffman and co-star Leo Woodall becomes something else. Hoffman plays the old master teaching his skills to Woodall’s callow youth, Niki, a kid with gifts – perfect pitch and hearing so acute he wears headphones to protect his ears. Niki’s true … Read more

Letty Lynton

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Jerry and Letty

Letty Lynton tells the story of Madeleine Smith, who wanted to move on from a lover who didn’t want to move on from her. And so she killed him. The same story was also told in David Lean’s Madeleine in 1950 (good too) and in Dishonored Lady, starring Hedy Lamarr in 1947 (not seen it). Here it’s Joan Crawford who plays the deadly female, a rich flibbertigibbet first encountered in Montevideo dancing the night away with hot Latin lover Emile Renaul (Nils Asther). It’s obvious from the film’s opening moments that Letty has had enough of Emile, who’s a bit clingy for her liking. And so, instructing her maid Miranda (Louise Closser Hale) … Read more

Black Site

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Abby aims a gun

Whatever else you think of Black Site, at some point during its short running time you’re probably going to start wondering how it can be that the second-in-command at a black site doesn’t understand what its purpose is. Black sites, for those who missed out on the early years of the 21st century, are – Wikipedia definition – “clandestine state-operated detention centers where prisoners who have not been charged with a crime are incarcerated without due process or court order, are often mistreated and murdered, and have no recourse to bail.” Michelle Monaghan plays the official in question, Abby Trent. She’s a popular, driven, second-in-command at a black site run by the Five … Read more

Gambit

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Harry on the phone

Gambit upends the crime caper and that’s reason enough to watch it. It also features Michael Caine and Shirley MacLaine playing exquisitely to type – another. Caine one year after Alfie and the same year as The Ipcress File is the smart, cocky working class guy in a hurry; MacLaine halfway between Billy Wilder’s Irma La Douce and Bob Fosse’s Sweet Charity is the streetwise operator who’s sharper than she’s letting on. Short story: Harry (Caine) recruits dancer Nicole (MacLaine) because she is the spitting image of the dead wife of Shahbandar (Herbert Lom), the richest man in the world. Together Harry and Nicole pull off an elaborate heist after working their way … Read more

A Useful Ghost

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Ghostly Nat and her husband March

A Useful Ghost reminds us that the ghost story and the horror movie can be different things entirely. Haunting doesn’t necessarily mean mayhem and death. This film in some respects takes us back to a time when films like I Married a Witch or The Halfway House provided mainstream entertainment of a spooky rather than frightening kind, though neither of those old glories contained scenes of men having anal sex in an empty warehouse. Nor did they feature a central character called Academic Ladyboy (Wisarut Homhuan), first of the hauntees in Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s debut. In the film’s opening scenes Academic Ladyboy is buying a vacuum cleaner to deal with the dust in his … Read more

Night Train to Paris

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Catherine and a disguised Alan

Here’s Leslie Nielsen before Airplane! changed the course of his career, in Night Train to Paris, a curio from 1964. Nielsen plays a former spy dragged back into the game over a valuable computer program. Alan Hamilton’s task: to get the tape containing the program to Paris pdq. The impediment: so far, everyone who’s handled it has died at the hands of a fat assassin. Can Alan succeed where everyone else has failed? And will exotic beauty Catherine Carrel (Aliza Gur) be able to help him? I remember making the same journey, London Victoria to Gare du Nord in Paris, and if this film does one great service, it helps explain why that … Read more

Sense and Sensibility

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Deborah Ayorinde as Elinor

Ragebait Sense and Sensibility from the Hallmark Channel, which seems perverse on the face of it. The home of white-sliced drama brings us a Jane Austen adaptation peopled with black faces. Bonnets and breeches are as per, stately piles visited, manners and refinement much in evidence. Before the purists take up their burning torches, this version does have something. Chiefly its two stars, Deborah Ayorinde and Bethany Antonia, as the sisters Austen teases mightily with suitors appropriate and inappropriate, blabbermouth cousins, silly-arse older men and busybody older women. Elinor the practical, Marianne the impetuous, which is how “sense and sensibility” translates in the 21st century, with a bit of poetic licence. Among the … Read more

Mikey and Nicky

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Nicky and Mikey on the bus

A cult movie from a cult director, Mikey and Nicky stars the ever-cultish John Cassavetes and his old friend Peter Falk as a pair of low-life crooks having one last night together before the day of reckoning arrives. Nicky (Cassavetes) has done something to a bad guy and is now in hiding, petrified, in a hotel room. When Mikey (Falk) arrives to talk him out of his fear, Nicky is not entirely convinced that Mikey isn’t after him as well. But he allows himself to be persuaded and soon the two of them are heading out into the night, which will prove to be the last one for one of them. Shot in … Read more

Holy Days

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Judy Davis, Elijah Tamati, Miriam Margolyes and Jacki Weaver

Holy Days is a twinkly and comforting National Treasure Road Movie about three New Zealand nuns who go on a road trip to try and stop their convent being pulled down by a nasty developer. Miriam Margolyes, Jacki Weaver and Judi Davis play the valiant sisters trying to locate the property deeds that will avert the disaster. Along for the ride is Brian, a motherless lad angry at dad’s new partner. A bit of a softie, maybe Brian will be annealed by time spent with Sisters Mary Clare (Weaver), Agnes (Davis) and Luke (Margolyes) as they pootle towards the South Island, where a former nun, now a lawyer, may be able to get … Read more