Review

Frankie

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Isabelle Huppert as Frankie

Having made films with more than a hint of the French about them – character driven, focused on metropolitan angst, loose, semi-improvised acting style, unafraid to let nothing happen – Ira Sachs finally gets almost all of the way there with Frankie, a drama set in Portugal but with plenty of French speakers in his cast. Patrice Chéreau’s 1998 drama Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train (Ceux Qui M’aiment Prendront le Train) is a close analogue, though here the central figure around which everything spins is still alive. She’s played by Isabelle Huppert as Françoise (aka Frankie), a famous actress who has called all her family together in Sintra, Portugal, for … Read more

Bad Trip

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Chris and Bud screaming

Bad Trip is Borat revisited. Same basic idea – pranks being foisted on real people, with a bit of scripted dramatic infill (a story) connecting the gotchas together. The pranks are all standalones, one-offs, which explains that no matter how short this sort of film is (the two Borat movies and Bad Trip all come in at a sober 90 minutes-ish), they always feel a bit too long. But is Bad Trip funny is surely the only important question? The answer is that, yes, it is. I went into laugh-out-loud vocalising at about 15 minutes in and erupted frequently right up to the final moments. The plot is a string of spider silk caught … Read more

The Reckoning

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Grace with a gun

Contagion, hysteria, conspiracy and the patriarchy – you can’t accuse British horror film The Reckoning of not being on the money, even though it was shot in Hungary in 2019 while the Sars-Cov2 virus was still getting its boots on. Patriarchy is its biggest concern, though, or one 17th-century woman’s plucky fight against it. Charlotte Kirk both co-wrote and stars as Grace, the hot widow whose looks earn her the unwelcome attention of the local squire (Steven Waddington), who’s already dispatched her husband with plague-spiked ale and now – out of bitter spite at being sexually rebuffed – has accused her of being a witch. Visually and tonally we’re in the realm of the … Read more

Siberia

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Clint and an Inuit man out in the snow

Abel Ferrara’s 2019 film Siberia wasn’t shot in Siberia, unlike the 2018 film of the same name starring Keanu Reeves, which was. Ferrara now lives in Rome and so, needing snowy wastes to tell a story about a remote bar-owner’s journey into his own psyche, he starts and ends his film in the Italian Tyrol, where the white drifts of winter snow pass muster. The film is based on Carl Jung’s Red Book, which was a full-blown surrender to his own unconscious mind in the wake of his split with fellow psychoanlyst Sigmund Freud. Though he worked by day, gave lectures and saw patients, by night Jung just let it all go, letting … Read more

Supernova

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Stanley Tucci and Colin Firth in a field

Supernova is an admirably tight drama starring Colin Firth and Stanley Tucci. It gives us the who and the where immediately – Sam (Firth) and Tusker (Tucci), a long-established couple on holiday in the Lake District in one of those tiny RVs, a Fiat Autotrail, that offer all the creature comforts (cooking, sleeping, sanitation) a crab could want. There’s a bed (the opening shot of a naked Sam wrapped around Tusker) and there’s banter as the two drive from one location to another, Tusker wheeling out the terrible jokes, Sam groaning in response, the pair of them reacting to the landscape and the songs on the radio as the vehicle snakes along tight … Read more

Into the Labyrinth

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Escapee Samantha with Dr Green

Dustin Hoffman and Toni Servillo in the same film? Into the Labyrinth (aka L’uomo del labirinto) is a properly intriguing prospect. Hoffman a madness-in-his-Method actor since his breakthrough in 1967’s The Graduate, Servillo the king of the hangdog deapan – or is that the deadpan hangdog? – and long-time collaborator with Paolo Sorrentino (in films like The Great Beauty and The Consequences of Love). Before you get too excited, they share only one scene together, and that’s right at the end, an afterthought possibly tacked on to give the publicity machine more to work with (and I’ve obliged by using the resulting picture). The two actors inhabit entirely different filmic universes, united only … Read more

Mickey One

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Mickey on stage

Old Hollywood meets new in Mickey One, a neglected thriller from 1965 directed by Arthur Penn and starring Warren Beatty, both of whom would upend the cosy certainties of a sclerotic industry with Bonnie and Clyde two years later. They run through a few of the possibilities here. The film focuses almost entirely on Beatty, as a club comedian and light-entertainment guy who goes on the run from the Mob after getting on the wrong side of them over money, a woman, and possibly a few other things. Mickey One is what the fugitive ends up being called after assuming the identity of a turned-over vagrant, “One” being as near as most people … Read more

Giant Little Ones

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Ballas and Franky on bikes

Franky is a buff swimmer and from the moment Giant Little Ones kicks off it seems fairly certain, from the way the camera is lingering on his upper body as he wakes up in the morning, that it’s a gay drama we’re watching. Why a camera can’t have a female gaze, I don’t know. Discuss. Anyhow, Franky is popular with the other guys in the swim team, has a girlfriend “with a fine rack” according to one of his friends, and what’s more she’s very keen to lose her virginity and Franky seems like the guy to do it. All this changes after Franky’s birthday and a late-night, very drunken, stoned fumble with … Read more

Yes Day

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The family all dressed up

Yes Day not only stars Jennifer Garner but it’s produced by her. It’s her film. It’s another of those goofy family comedies that seem to be her default, the sort of film she returns to when she fancies some more of the 13 Going On 30 action – pop culture-y, adults doing kid stuff, silly, sentimental, a touch magical. It wastes no time getting its offer onto the screen. By 15 minutes in we’ve met Allison (Garner) and Carlos (Edgar Ramirez), two life-affirming novelty-accepting “Yes” people who have got married and discovered that parenting is more about saying “No” – don’t stick your fingers in that socket etc – to the point that their three … Read more

Rose Plays Julie

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Ann Skelly as Rose/Julie

Rose Plays Julie arrives on screens an entire year late. I have an email from January 2020 telling me it would be out in “Spring 2020”, but here we are in Spring 2021, after a year of slippage. Presumably directors Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy were waiting for the cinemas to re-open and eventually gave up. I’m glad they did. This is a brilliant film, and while it probably would suit the claustrophobic murk of a big theatre, the confines of a living room don’t do it too much harm. “These are operatic film makers in search of a bigger better subject,” is what I wrote in my notes for Mister John, the … Read more