Review

The Spider’s Web: Britain’s Second Empire

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Member of the European Parliament Eva Joly

An urgent, informative film asking all the right questions – or how the rich people stole all the money Here in Brexit Britain we find ourselves in a peculiar situation. In spite of having done pretty well out of the European Union, what with various rebates, opt-outs and special deals, fifth richest country in the world and all that, the country suddenly rebelled, and stormed out of the arrangement in a strop, angry about something that no one can quite articulate – it might be the straightness of bananas or immigrants or democratic accountability, or something else entirely. Meanwhile, the political left largely appear to have lost their connection to their working class … Read more

Northern Lights

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Rob, Mia and Emma sit on a bench

When is a feature film not a feature film? When it’s only 53 minutes long is one possible answer. Not that it matters too much in writer/director Nicholas Connor’s debut in a category we might just choose to call “definitely not a short”. Perhaps I’m being a dick, because all the elements of the feature are here – characters, a setting, a recognisable story arc, a satisfying conclusion – just boiled down to a nourishing concentrate, like a delicious stock. According to a dedication at the end of the film, Connor’s drama is inspired by the work of Chris Cyprus, a Mossley-based (Greater Manchester) artist whose work could be very loosely called a mix … Read more

The Devil Wears Prada

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Women in black: Anne Hathaway, Meryl Streep and Emily Blunt

The sort of film that has an inbuilt media audience – women’s magazines – who will receive it with the same lack of scrutiny as they treat each launch of a new beauty product, The Devil Wears Prada is a clever title halfway towards being a clever film. It’s adapted by Aline Brosh McKenna from Lauren Weisberger’s chick-lit novel, and since Weisberger’s spent some time working at American Vogue as editor Anna Wintour’s assistant we don’t have to look too far for its inspiration. Anne Hathaway plays the simpering Weisberger avatar, an intern/newbie at a fashion magazine not unadjacent to Vogue. And Meryl Streep is also clearly styled on the fashion bible’s redoubtable editor, who … Read more

Gypo

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Chloe Sirene, Pauline McLynn and Rula Lenska in Gypo

Gypo is a Dogme film, the 37th made according to the strictures of the protocol dreamt up by a group of Scandinavian film-makers, including Lars Von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, in 1995. Naturalism is the stated idea, but Dogme could also be seen as an extension of Ikea flatpack design principles into film-making, or those of no-smells, no-bells Nordic Protestantism, or the “form follows function” of the Bauhaus, or fellow Scandinavian Carl Theodor Dreyer’s spare aesthetic. Take your pick. What’s unusual about Gypo is that it is a British film, a kitchen-sinker set in the bleak coastal town of Margate. It tells the story from three different angles of a mother/daughter pair of … Read more

Havoc

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Anne Hathaway vamps in Havoc

What’s this – lovely, sweet, wide-eyed Anne Hathaway saying “fuck”? Getting into a fight? Showing us her breasts? Giving a blowjob? And within the first ten minutes of the film starting too. Someone, it seems, is after an image makeover, and thanks to director Barbara Kopple, she gets one. That might be what Havoc is most remembered for, in fact, because in most other respects this is a rather disappointing “moral panic” movie like the ones from the 1950s where teenagers would race bikes too fast or hang with the wrong crowd, or both. Here the wrong crowd is people of colour and it’s the white people who get into trouble hanging with … Read more

Volver

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Penelope Cruz in Volver

Pedro Almodóvar is bang back on form in a film celebrating a way of life he’s spent the best part of his artistic life revolting against – family centred, non-cosmopolitan, conservative, Catholic. Well, Generalissimo Franco has been dead a while now.The word Volver means “return” in Spanish, and if Almodóvar is returning to something he long ago rejected – with a fair degree of tenderness (ah, maturity) – Penelope Cruz is also back in a Spanish speaking role, in her home country, in the sort of film she started out in, a drama with its feet in familiar soil but its head who knows where (see Abre los Ojos). It’s set in one … Read more

The Departed

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Jack Nicholson in The Departed

Martin Scorsese’s remake of the brilliant 2002 Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs adds 50 minutes of flab to what was a lean, taut thriller. The plot is the same – cop bosses Martin Sheen and Mark Wahlberg send in undercover man Leo DiCaprio to bust a gang. Unbeknown to the boys at the precinct, gang boss Jack Nicholson is one step ahead of them and has been grooming a placeman of his own (Matt Damon) for years, and he’s now deep deep inside their gangbusting team. The drama springs from the “Who is going to get whacked first?” premise as each side works out after a while that there’s a mole on the … Read more

The Reception

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Darien Sills-Evans in The Reception

The Reception is a film that seems to be heading gloriously in one direction, only to actually be heading disastrously in another. It tells the surely thorny enough story of Jeannette, a rich French-American woman (Pamela Holden Stewart) and her African-American lover Martin (Wayne Lamont Sims), who live in bucolic splendour in upstate New York, where he gains her financial patronage for his career as a (blocked) painter, in return for his companionship and quiescence about her drinking – the few glasses of red per night generally turning into a torrent. Then her daughter Sierra (Maggie Burkwit) turns up with her husband Andrew (Darien Sills-Evans) and the delicate balance is undone. It turns … Read more

Barnyard

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Otis the cow in Barnyard

Otis, the barnyard bull, has udders. Because, kids, that’s what bulls have, isn’t it? Voiced by Kevin James, and with a first name that is generally appended to a male, it’s clear that either Otis is a transgender animal or cowardice has taken hold somewhere at the design stage in the latest animal CG comedy off the conveyor belt. This “me too” effort from Paramount also has a plot that seems determined to fit in, not stand out, it being a recycling of The Lion King. Growing a pair, ironically, is what it’s about too. Otis is the young motorbiking cowlet (I’d call him a bullock but he clearly isn’t) about town who has … Read more

The Plague

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Up close and personal with the Filth in The Plague

The story behind this film is that it was made for buttons (£3,500) by 20something Londoner Greg Hall, and was then beginning the long slow slide towards festival obscurity when Mike Leigh saw it, started championing it, and hey presto, it has a cinema release. The story at its front is about an culturally and ethnically mixed crew of young, urban Londoners from a council estate. They walk the line between high spirits and illegality, these self-assured youngsters, but suddenly get into trouble by straying beyond the world of tagging, pills and parties. If it isn’t tied up maybe as well as it should be, The Plague has enough of a plot to … Read more