Review

Attica

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Dead inmates in the aftermath of the retaking of Attica

On 9 September 1971 the inmates at the Attica Correctional Facility in New York State rose up, overpowered the guards and embarked on the largest prison rebellion in US history. Five days later, the authorities took back control in a brutal display of force, resulting in 29 dead inmates and ten dead hostages. Director Stanley Nelson is a veteran black producer/director whose CV contains titles such as The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution and Boss: The Black Experience. So you might expect Attica, his documentary about those events, to be quite partisan, more campaign than chronicle. But chronicle is evidently the way Nelson has decided to go. His documentary turns out to … Read more

The Brain

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The Brain, head titled, with a passer-by

If you haven’t heard of The Brain (Le Cerveau), then you’ve missed the biggest box office hit in France in 1969 and a film that the New York Times described as “one of the freshest, fastest, nimblest and funniest comedies to hit town… in a long, long time.” I’ll just quickly add that the Times is overselling, massively, and that for a good long chunk of it, until it gets into the home straight in fact, The Brain is very unfunny, mostly unthrilling and largely unglamorous. But once it does it miraculously shifts gear, or maybe by that point I’d just given up and yielded to it. The vibe is The Pink Panther … Read more

Brian and Charles

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Brian and Charles look at each other

Feelgood British low-budget whimsy, Brian and Charles‘s only real fault is that it’s taken the maddening decision to tell its story as a mock-doc. “Twee” – a regular criticism – could be lined up as another possible criticism, though I suspect that “fanciful” is what the naysayers really mean. In which case discard the bulk of Hollywood’s output. It started life as a short costing £500 in 2017, which British TV station Channel 4 liked and wanted to convert into a series. That never happened but C4 did put up some of the money for this film, the feature debut of director Jim Archer. Though really the film belongs to its two stars, David … Read more

Chronopolis

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One of the immortals

Avant-garde sci-fi stop-motion animation, anyone? French, as well, or made in France, at least, the only full-length feature made by Polish-born Piotr Kamler. “Full-length” is actually a bit of a stretch as a description. Chronopolis is only 52 minutes long, and the original version was 66 minutes, so hardly The Irishman. The shorter one is Kamler’s preferred cut. It removed a chunk of late action and completely obliterated the narration by Michael Lonsdale, the French-born actor of British ancestry who’d turn up now and again in English-speaking movies, often in villain roles (he was Hugo Drax in Moonraker, for instance). But, as said, no sign nor sound of him in the only version … Read more

Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person

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Humanist vampire Sasha

Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person does in six longish words what Snakes on a Plane does in four short ones – telegraphs a plot and a tone in a title. In the original French (or French Canadian, if you’re being picky), Vampire Humaniste Cherche Suicidiaire Consentant, it comes in one word shorter. So there’s not a lot more to say about the feature debut by Ariane Louis-Seize, except that you should watch it if vampire movies like What We Do in the Shadows (for laddish Ocker humour), or Let the Right One In (Nordic minimalism), or My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To (dark US family relations), or A Girl … Read more

He Ran All the Way

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John Garfield and Shelley Winters

Dead of a heart attack at only 39, John Garfield’s final film, He Ran All the Way, is a typically punchy affair, the scrappy Garfield playing a smalltime criminal who holds a family hostage after a heist gone wrong results in the death of a cop. In early scenes reminiscent of Brighton Rock fugitive Nick Robey (Garfield) darts among the holiday crowds at an amusement park and picks up a sweet blonde, Peg (Shelley Winters), using her to help him hide in plain sight from the police. But for the most part this short, cheap movie is set at the apartment where Peg lives with her father (Wallace Ford), mother (Selena Royle) and … Read more

Sasquatch Sunset

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Male and female sasquatch in the forest

Do you believe in Bigfoot? Sasquatch Sunset does. It’s a 90-minute would-be nature documentary shot as if the big hairy cryptozoological beasts really did exist (but they do!), and follows them on the daily round – from eating and grooming to mating and dying – over the course of one year. It’s people inside impressive suits, of course, and some of them you will know. The four are Jesse Eisenberg, Riley Keough, Christophe Zajac-Denek (who is a small adult and plays the child), while Nathan Zeller, who also co-directs with his brother David, plays the extra male of the pod. For beasts these sasquatch are quite human. They communicate in grunts, use sticks … Read more

Burnt Offerings

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Marian and Ben

1976’s Burnt Offerings can’t really bear the analysis often heaped on it. Regularly described as either a weighty commentary on materialism or as a metaphorical analysis of the dissolution of the American family, it’s much better seen as a mood piece with not that much to say but an awful lot to give if you give yourself up to it. There is an American family in it, though, and it does get put through its paces after Ben Rolf (Oliver Reed), wife Marian (Karen Black), son David (Lee Montgomery) and Ben’s aunt Elizabeth (Bette Davis) take on a vast, palatial house for the summer at a rent that is at the low end … Read more

Gasoline Rainbow

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The guys on the roof of their van in the dark

Five kids head for the coast in an old van in Gasoline Rainbow, the Ross brothers’ first feature since Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets, their intensely evocative film about the last day in the life of a Las Vegas dive bar. Bloody Nose looked like a documentary but there were suggestions at the edges that everything wasn’t quite as it was being portrayed. Those doubts become a bit more concrete in Gasoline Rainbow, which is what would be called “scripted reality” if it were TV, and if it were more scripted. It’s loose, incredibly so, looks like a documentary and feels like a documentary, with the sort of free, sometimes hesitant performances you get … Read more

Secret Honor

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Philip Baker Hall as President Nixon

Secret Honor is one of director Paul Thomas Anderson’s favourite films, was loved by late lamented critic Roger Ebert and is one of the select fraction of movies given a home in Criterion’s choice “Collection”. Most people have never heard of it, though they do know its maker, Robert Altman, director of Mash, The Long Goodbye and Nashville, and later The Player, Short Cuts and Gosford Park. Secret Honor came between those two blocks of three, in the period after the relative flop of 1980’s Popeye and the comeback of 1992’s The Player, when no matter what Altman did (film, TV or theatre) nothing really seemed to hit bullseye. Nor, to be frank, … Read more