Review

Sylvie’s Love

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Robert and Sylvie outside her dad's record store

The remarkable thing about Sylvie’s Love is actually how unremarkable it is in many ways. It’s a white-sliced, white-picket-fence melodrama of a sort that once might have starred a Joan Crawford. Except it’s black rather than white people playing all the parts. That shouldn’t be remarkable, nor should stories about the black middle classes, but it is and Eugene Ashe’s drama knows it’s doing something different in its deliberately old-fashioned, “they don’t make them like this any more” way. Tessa Thompson plays Sylvie, the young woman who works in her daddy’s record store but really wants to get a job in TV. Nnamdi Asomugha is Robert, the tall, dark and handsome saxophonist who … Read more

We Can Be Heroes

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The young stars of We Can Be Heroes

Robert Rodriguez takes the Spy Kids idea for another spin around the block, and crashes on the way. Spy Kids, if you don’t remember, was about kids stepping up when their James Bond-like parents got waylaid. Here the parents are not spies but superheroes, and after they’ve been captured by evil aliens their progeny band together to free them. The kids all have superpowers too. Noodles is stretchy, Slo-Mo can move super quickly, A Capella can sing at pitches so high and low that the laws of physics are bent out of shape. Rewind can turn back time. His sister, Fast Forward… you’re ahead of me. There are more of them, some of … Read more

Blithe Spirit

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Leslie Mann, Dan Stevens, Isla Fisher, Judi Dench

“Hail to thee, blithe Spirit! Bird thou never wert,” run the lines in Shelley’s poem To a Skylark. And though there’s plenty of spirit in 2020’s remake of a 1945 film often considered a classic, this bird resolutely fails to take wing. The basic plot remains the same as the original film (and original play): Charles and Ruth Condomine are a rich couple living in elegant boredom out in the English countryside. He’s a writer struggling with his latest novel. So he gets in a bogus spiritualist, Madame Arcati, to conduct a seance, which waggish Charles will use as background material in his book. The seance goes oddly right, or wrong. When Madame … Read more

Wonder Woman 1984

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Gal Gadot in Wonder Woman gear

And so Wonder Woman 1984. Last time we saw Gal Gadot’s lasso-swinging Amazon she was helping to win the First World War, and now, nearly 70 years on, here she is again in the era of Armani suits and “greed is good” and in a year most closely associated with George Orwell. This is a big, heavy, beast of a film that’s too long, too slow, too dull, and if that is a political message about democracy that writer/director Patty Jenkins is trying to sneak in there, someone should really have told her not to. Gal Gadot remains a wondrous Wonder Woman, though, a flawless paragon of superherodom, and the story gets off … Read more

Why Don’t You Just Die!

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Andrey throws the TV

The trailer does not lie. Why Don’t You Just Die! (Papa, sdokhni in the original Russian) is a camp melodrama awash with blood, gruesomeness, novel ways of hurting people and comic-book cruelty. It’s as if all the horrible things that ever happened to Wile E Coyote were bundled together and then brought to the screen by a Quentin Tarantino or Robert Rodriguez in one of their Grindhouse jaunts. The opening shot: a young man with a fantastically broken nose (Aleksandr Kuznetsov, and that’s his real nose) is waiting outside an apartment with a hammer behind his back. The door after much knocking opens. It is a bullet-headed man (Vitaliy Khaev). Andrey, the young … Read more

First Cow

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King-Lu and Cookie out in the woods

Kelly Reichardt’s films often operate at two levels. At the surface one story plays out, while somewhere to one side, and often as a comment on the first story, something different is going on. First Cow could really be called First Love, since it’s the story of two men who meet in difficult circumstances and then form a bond that lasts until death. What it looks like, though, especially at first, is a western, a story of a cook who’s travelling with hard-bitten fur trappers. They’re all out in the forest and there isn’t enough food. And even if there was, the trappers don’t seem to like what the cook’s been serving. There’s … Read more

Soul

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Joe playing jazz

We’re so used to the phrase Pixar Movie that it’s often easy to forget that they are in fact directed by actual human beings, not rendering algorithms. Soul is co-directed by Pete Docter and Kemp Powers, says the imdb, but the end credits of the film itself tell us that it’s “Directed by Pete Docter” and “Co-directed by Kemp Powers”, not “Co-directed by Pete Docter and Kemp Powers”. Kemp was heavily involved in the film, particularly at the conceptual and writing stages, but even so it still feels like a Docter film. His last one was Inside Out, the story of a little girl’s personality in crisis. And before that Up and Monsters, … Read more

Anything for Jackson

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Mrs and Mr Walsh hold each other

Horror films tend to be populated by sexy young things, but in Anything for Jackson the two protagonists are a pair of people in their 60s, played to the hilt by Julian Richings and Sheila McCarthy. Actually, Anything for Jackson is more trad than it at first appears, because the couple in question aren’t actually the good guys, they’re a pair of Satanists – “Glory be to Satan” they chant at the coven where they meet their fellow devil-worshippers – who have kidnapped a heavily pregnant woman and plan to use her child as the receptacle for the spirit of their dead grandchild, Jackson. It’s a Rosemary’s Baby from the point of view … Read more

Summer of 85

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David and Alex on a motorbike

Intense, sexy and brooding, Summer of 85 (Été 85 in the original French) is François Ozon’s latest look at human relationships of a particularly febrile sort, all set in a seaside town at a time when Ozon himself would have been a teenager. After a languid and deliberately cinematic tracking shot from the water’s edge right up the beach and onto the promenade, Ozon then gives us a smell of what’s about to play out by introducing us to two friends discussing what they’re going to get up to later that day. Both are handsome lads, and seem to be either standing too close to each other, staring too intently at each other … Read more

The Racer

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Dominique (left) with star rider Lupo

The Racer is three stories in one. It’s an insider’s view of the life of the domestique, the unsung heroes of cycling who set the pace for their top man, act as a windbreak and even help him take a piss – the glamour. It’s a personal drama about a long-time domestique now approaching the end of his career who would like, just once, to wear the yellow jersey after winning a stage. And it’s a romance about a man finding there is more to life than cycling. All three combine in the figure of Dominique Chabol (Louis Talpe), a solid team player embarking on 1998’s Tour de France, the first stages of … Read more