Review

Friendship

by
Craig and Austin

It’s hard to discuss a film you viscerally hate, as I did Friendship. Call me a sensitive snowflake but I’m just not into protracted depictions of inadequacy leading to humiliation. This has been Tim Robinson’s shtick in the various TV shows he’s been involved with. Now he’s brought the same cringe persona to a film, all 100 minutes of it. Or writer/director Andrew DeYoung has, in his feature debut, which he wrote expressly for Robinson. And yet I’m giving it three stars. To explain: it’s the difference between liking and admiring, when it comes down to it. I didn’t like Friendship for one minute but it undoubtedly does do what it set out … Read more

La Cérémonie aka The Ceremony

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Sophie and Jeanne with shotguns

Ruth Rendell didn’t like many adaptations of her books but she did like 1995’s La Cérémonie (The Ceremony), a reworking of her thriller A Judgment in Stone. She wasn’t alone. Roger Ebert put it on his Great Movies list, the Cahiers du Cinéma people named it the best film of 1995, and Bong Joon Ho says it’s one of the main inspirations for Parasite, his Best Picture Oscar winner from 2019. It’s a chilly, anxious thriller about a mouselike maid working for a rich French family who strikes up a friendship with a woman who runs the local post office. Sophie is cool, efficient, doesn’t say much and does her job so brilliantly … Read more

A Real Pain

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Benji hugging David's head

Two Jewish cousins go on a Holocaust Holiday? No end of things could go wrong with that as an idea. The marvel of A Real Pain is that writer/director/producer/star Jesse Eisenberg doesn’t just sidestep potential disaster, but hands the film to another actor, Kieran Culkin, while doing so. It’s Before Sunrise in structure, but instead of pretty, young Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy hashing things out over a night of escalating romantic potential, it’s Americans Benji and David in Poland, off on a pilgrimage to see where their Polish grandma Doris once lived, talking the entire time, assessing themselves as people, as Jews in a country where their kind haven’t always fared so … Read more

The Bird with the Crystal Plumage

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Close up of Tony Musante

The film that put the Italian giallo genre on the international map, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo) is Dario Argento’s directing debut and the great cinematographer Vittorio Storaro’s first film in colour. It’s archetypal giallo in many ways. Archetypal Argento, too, you could say, for bad and good. Formless plotting but a good twist, abrupt psychological transitions but beautifully sustained mood, a schoolboy approach to sexuality (ooh, look, a nipple) but a heightened sense of threat. Argento wrote it in five days and came up with a story he’d re-use multiple times, of an artist of some sort (a writer, in this case), a foreigner (American here) … Read more

Sinners

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Michael B Jordan as Stack and Smoke

Is Sinners a vampire movie? Even members of the cast couldn’t agree whether it was or not. Delroy Lindo said it wasn’t, Michael B Jordan said it was. Either way it’s bold and ambitious, full of stuff to discuss, book-club style, over a drink afterwards. A bit didactic, a bit tasteful, a bit too in love with Steven Spielberg – if that’s a crime, I don’t know. Your mileage etc etc. Riding along somewhere in the back of the narrative bus is the story of blues legend Robert Johnson, who went down to the crossroads and met the devil, who gave him all the best tunes. But that story is diluted to a … Read more

The Bunny Game

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Close up of Bunny with cigarette

It’s unlikely you will ever have seen anything like The Bunny Game before, or will want to again. A film too strong and dark for many tastes, it’s undeniably brilliant at what it does. But couldn’t it do it elsewhere? Facetiousness to one side, The Bunny Game gets the thumbs up from the likes of horror sage Eli Roth, who loves it, and the thumbs down from the UK’s British Board of Film Classification, which refused to give it a certificate. The BBFC thought the film likely to “risk harm to individuals” (a line from its guidelines) due to its focus on “the unremitting sexual and physical abuse of a helpless woman” (a … Read more

Old Guy

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Wihlborg and Dolinski

Old Guy should be a good film but isn’t. Thanks to someone somewhere along the line deciding to funny things up. Not that the funny doesn’t have its moments. Take the opening scene, of an old guy with a big floppy grey moustache at a rave full of young people. Smiling ecstatically and throwing shapes, he’s caught up in the heady moshiness of it all. The camera spins. The music pumps. At a certain point the old dude clambers onto the stage to get chummy with the DJ. Only to be immediately escorted off the stage again by bouncers, though he’s punching the air in delight at having stormed the citadel. The fact … Read more

Tango aka Tango, no me dejes nunca

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Two tango dancers on stage

Carlos Saura’s Tango, from 1998, is a backstage musical with a techy overlay and a political undertow. It’s meta this, that and the other, which distracts from the simplicity of what’s on offer to some extent. Which is… an old-fashioned Fred Astaire-style musical. Nothing wrong with a Fred Astaire musical, as long as the dancing is filmed properly, which it is. Miguel Ángel Solá stars, as the injured director licking his wounds after a recent car accident and relationship break-up with his star dancer, Laura Fuentes (Cecilia Narova). Mario Suárez is now putting together a new show, one that he wants to do his way – political, challenging, artistic – though the money men are trying … Read more

Divine Love aka Divino Amor

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Joana dressed in white in front of a painted background of a beach

There’s an opaque quality to Divine Love (Divino Amor), as there was with Gabriel Mascaro’s last film, Neon Bull. But, subject matter to one side, the big difference between them is that Neon Bull didn’t explain itself, whereas Divino Amor does, only in the film’s last third revealing that it hasn’t really been explaining itself at all. It’s all been a bit of a feint. The genre, for instance. Sci-fi, or so it claims, with the action set in Brazil in 2027 (barely into the future at all then) where Joana and Danilo, a loving couple are members of a charismatic evangelical church. When not dancing like dervishes at church raves – the … Read more

Devil’s Doorway

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Orrie and Lance in a clinch

The revisionist western par excellence, Devil’s Doorway is the story of the despicable white man stealing the land off the noble American Indian and then getting nasty when the Indian objects. It stars Robert Taylor as Broken Lance, a Shoshone Indian known as Lance Powell while serving in the US Army, where he won a Congressional Medal of Honor for bravery in the Civil War. Now the war is over Lane is back in the Medicine Bow area where he grew up, to raise cattle on land that’s been in his family for generations. In an early speech in the local saloon Lance expresses the hope that, now the hostilities are over, everyone … Read more