Review

The Echo (El Eco)

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A girl collects kindling in the forest

Hardscrabble lives are what film-maker Tatiana Huezo specialises in and that’s what she gives us in The Echo (El Eco), a documentary following three families in a Mexican village, particularly the girls just coming of age and contemplating a future of mixed possibilities. A couple of years ago Huezo gave us the excellent Prayers for the Stolen, also set in Mexico, also interested in young women, a documentary-influenced fiction feature with a double shot of drug-cartel thriller to drag us along. Now back with her first love for the last in her so-called “trilogy of pain”, Huezo gives us The Echo‘s key scene early on. Montserrat Hernandez is helping her mother bathe her … Read more

I Knew Her Well

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Close up of Adriana

A beautiful young woman glides through life bewitching the men around her in Antonio Pietrangeli’s I Knew Her Well (Io la conoscevo bene). Stefania Sandrelli, a knockout in real life who won a beauty contest and went to Rome to become a film star, plays Adriana Astarelli (similarly alliterative names surely no coincidence), a beauty following the same route but falling into every trap along the way. Pietrangeli’s camera first finds Adriana lying topless on her front in the sun on the beach, glides up her legs and over her buttocks before following Adriana back to the beauty salon where she is meant to be working. By the time she gets back there … Read more

The Super 8 Years

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Annie and son in a screenshot from the 1970s

Annie Ernaux won the Nobel Prize for literature for a body of autobiographical body of work charting her own life. The Super 8 Years is pretty much more of the same, except in filmic form. At its most basic and off-putting level it’s a “what I did on my holidays” narration over clips from a family’s home movies. At another a snapshot of a lost era and the history of a development of a writer. In 1972 Annie and husband Philippe Ernaux (always addressed by his full name) bought a Super 8 camera. It was, she says in voiceover, “the ultimate desired object… much more than a dishwasher or TV”, and set about … Read more

Wanda

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Close up of Wanda

Barbara Loden only made one feature film and Wanda is it. A remarkable piece of determinedly non-Hollywood vérité, it features no hero, comes with no moralistic teachable points and hasn’t got much of a plot, unless a relentless slide towards the abyss counts as one. Loden was inspired to make it after reading a newspaper article about a woman who had thanked a judge for sending her to jail, because that way her entirely formless life would be given some shape. Imagine a life like that, Loden mused. And here’s what the musing delivered, a portrait of a woman without any of what Loden called “the equipment” needed to live an independent life. … Read more

Monster Hunters

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Large image of a monster with teeth

Monster Hunters, not to be confused with Monster Hunter starring Milla Jovovich. Scratch that thought. Because half the thing about any of these Asylum “mockbusters” is that confusion is at least half of the deal. So many Asylum movies ride on the coattails of the advertising spends of much bigger movies, maybe peeling off a few of the less wary hoping for more Milla Jovovich or whoever. Another tranche of viewers come to see what new depths have been plumbed by, say, The Twisters or Road Wars: Max Fury. Yet others see The Asylum as being on a bit of a mission – the bigger and more complicated Hollywood movies get, the more … Read more

Á Nos Amours aka To Our Loves

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Suzanne in a white dress

A crazy mixed up film about a crazy mixed up girl, if it’s nothing else 1983’s Á Nos Amours (To Our Loves, sometimes To Our Romance) is a brilliant showcase for the astonishing Sandrine Bonnaire, sexy as young French stars tend to be, in her debut on screen, possessing it entirely and aged only 15 or so. She plays the effortlessly hot Suzanne, a precocious tease wielding the weapon of her good looks and fully functioning libido in a series of encounters with older men. These dark-haired, worldly and hairy guys are the opposite of Luc (Cyr Boitard), the fair-haired, sulky, smooth-skinned boyfriend of her own age she will dump repeatedly as Suzanne’s … Read more

Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare

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Peter removes his mask to reveal a disfigured face

“All children, except one, grow up.” The opening line to JM Barrie’s Peter Pan is already plenty creepy (especially those commas). Ripe for exploitation even. Now that the copyright has expired on the book, in the USA at any rate, someone has gone ahead and mined the children’s classic it for its horror potential. Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare is the result, a gory and unsettling tale of kidnap, drug abuse, dismemberment, screaming and lots of blood. We get a flavour of what’s to come in the pre-credits sequence. A young boy is charmed at the circus by a clown twisting balloons into animal shapes. Later the same boy is accosted at home by … Read more

A Story of Floating Weeds

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Kihachi and Otsune on a tatami mat

Beautiful, exquisite, poetic – choose your adjective, but there’s no denying the extraordinary visual effect of A Story of Floating Weeds, Yasujirō Ozu’s silent glory from 1934. A box-office smash in his native Japan, it was also a critical hit worldwide, and is a good place to start if you’re interested in tracking the development of Ozu’s classic style. Low, slow and nothing fancy, if you’re after a soundbite. It’s the story of a troupe of kabuki players who blow into a small town where, years before, the troupe’s leader, Kihachi (Takeshi Sakamoto) fathered a child with a young woman, Otsune (Chōko Iida). Now, older and perhaps tiring of the life of the … Read more

Fréwaka

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Close up of Shoo's face with red crucifixes reflected

There’s a definite influence of The Wicker Man in Fréwaka, Aislinn Clarke’s second feature. You might call it The Fréwaka Man if you were being facetious. But it deserves better than that. And in any case the main character is a woman, so that’s enough of that foolishness. It’s also the first horror movie in the Irish language, so doubly deserving of more than just a casual glance. Before the opening credits have rolled, Clarke has set out her stall – pagan, unnatural, spooky things are going to happen in this movie, it seems clear, from the vignette we’re given of a wedding where a clearly pregnant young woman is the bride, it’s … Read more

1984

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Aleksandr Obmanov as Mathematician D503

Diana Ringo has made the first feature film of 1984 in Russian, and she’s done it her way, with little in the way of exterior financial backing. It’s cheap and it’s cheerless, but that just adds to the dystopian gloom. George Orwell would probably approve. He might not be quite so happy about Yevgeni Zamyatin’s name being on the credits as a co-writer. Zamyatin wrote We, a Russian dystopian classic from 1924, which Orwell clearly borrowed from, though he stridently rejected the suggestion. In fact he’d already chucked that rock at Aldous Huxley, whose Brave New World was definitely lifted from Zamyatin, according to Orwell at least. Both men, at various points, would … Read more