Latest Posts
Murina
Martin Scorsese must be asked to lend his name to films by unknowns all the time. Murina obviously impressed him – he’s on board as an executive producer. It also won the Caméra d’Or, the gong handed out at Cannes to the best film by a debut director. Antoneta Alamat Kusijanovic is that director and her film is a brilliant, tightly wound study of a family falling apart. It would be ugly if it weren’t set on the coast of Croatia, an idyll where grouchy Ante (Leon Lucev), his pretty wife Nela (Danica Curcic) and their lithe, sporty daughter Julija (Gracija Filipovic) live a simple life, catching fish to eat to supplement their … Read more
World on a Wire
World on a Wire (Welt am Draht) is German auteur Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s only stab at sci-fi. An epic 3.5-hour behemoth, it was originally shown on TV in two parts, and starts as Fassbinder means it to go on, setting up questions about what we’re seeing in front of us. The opening shot is done on a lens so long it causes an atmospheric shimmer. The picture wobbles just a touch, as if we’re looking through a heat haze. When the people we’re seeing start speaking, their voices have the dead flat ambience of a dubbing studio. So much for atmosphere – we’re disconnected from these businessmen out on the street and entering … Read more
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness
The success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe must surprise even Marvel. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is the 28th film in the series, the fifth of Phase Four, and with talk of folding both Deadpool and Blade into the franchise, the MCU isn’t going anywhere just yet. Have a squint at the Trivia section for this film’s entry on the IMDb – it expands to fill several multiverses. Fanboy fervour unbound. Sam Raimi is part of that success. Though his Spider-Man trilogy of 20 years ago isn’t part of the official MCU – and Blade had to an extent already shown the way – the success of three films in five … Read more
Shame
Shame is Ingmar Bergman’s war movie. Except, being an Ingmar Bergman movie, it’s really about relationships, a marriage in trouble (probably Bergman’s own – number four was heading for the exit), and something else on top. Kriget (The War) was Bergman’s original title for it, but Skammen (literally, The Shame) is what Bergman settled on. So, not a generalised Shame but a specific instance of it. What that shame might be precisely is what Bergman will eventually reveal, but he starts out by painting a portrait of two former orchestral musicians (wife number four, Käbi Laretei, was a concert pianist) who have given it all up to live the good life, growing and selling … Read more
Crimes of the Future
David Cronenberg likes the title Crimes of the Future. He’s used it once before, for a film he made in 1970. He’s using it again here, 52 years later, but there’s no other connection between the two, at least on the surface. The 1970 is comedy sci-fi about a world without women, the 2022 recycling is good old-fashioned Cronenbergian body horror like he used to make. FYI, eXistenZ (1999), his last go at the genre he dominated in the 1980s and 90s, also had the working title Crimes of the Future. This Crimes of the Future’s origins go back to four years after eXistenZ, when Cronenberg was trying to put together a film … Read more
A Man Escaped
A Man Escaped is probably the best jailbreak movie ever made. Who said Shawshank? What’s more it was made almost as an “anti-movie” movie by a director so disdainful of cinema trickery and excess that he turned out one film after another to demonstrate that you don’t need it all, and that when it comes to drama on the big screen, sound is at least as important as image, possibly more so. Set in 1943 in Nazi-occupied France, it simply follows a Resistance fighter called Lafontaine (François Leterrier) into and then out of prison again. Taken in by the Nazis, escaping under his own steam, using nothing but ingenuity and everyday objects. A … Read more
Turning Red
In Turning Red, a hyperactive 13-year-old Toronto schoolgirl turns into a giant red panda one day – looks like a cat, but panda is what we’re told – and Pixar’s latest animated adventure swings into motion, as do thoughts about what this can all possibly mean. The girl is called Mei, she is the bookish daughter of an immigrant Chinese family and her condition comes on suddenly after Mei has been humiliated by her mother over a crush on a dopey guy who works in a local shop. Mei is becoming an adult. It’s a metaphor for a girl having her first period and becoming a woman, you’d think. Pixar seem to knock that … Read more
Mirror
The 2012 Greatest Films of All Time poll, conducted every decade by Sight and Sound magazine, has Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror at number 19. On the Critics’ Poll, at any rate. The poll of directors places it even higher, at number 9. So directors like it more than critics, who like it more than the general public, I’m guessing. Because Mirror is a non-linear, plotless affair, a ruminative, nostalgic bask in the past, autobiographical to a large extent, tracing, hopscotch style, Tarkovsky’s early life with a young mother and an absent father – the war was on and dad was fighting the Nazis. The word “oneiric” (dreamlike) is often wheeled out. It’s been called … Read more
Pleasure
If you want porn, there’s Pornhub, if you want a frank, unapologetic drama about the porn industry, try Pleasure, a Star Is Born (or not) story of a 19-year-old Swedish blow-in trying to make it in LA. Cocks and pussies are not prominent, in other words, though there are enough of them to convince us that director Ninja Thyberg has done her homework (she spent months gaining the trust of people in the biz), and in any case this is the story of wide-eyed, fresh-faced Bella trying to become a “star” rather than just a regular porn actor. Coercion and consent are what this is really about, though, and Pleasure hints at the … Read more
The Running Man
Say The Running Man and most people think of an underwhelming Arnold Schwarzenegger sci-fi/action movie from 1987. But there is another one, from 1963, starring Laurence Harvey, Lee Remick and Alan Bates, and it’s all about a man who goes nuts after getting a sniff of money. The action kicks off in London, where grieving widow Stella (Remick) is making a great show of burying her much loved husband, who recently died in a glider accident off the south coast. But Rex (Harvey) isn’t dead, and the staged accident was part of a scheme to get one over on the insurance company who had, Rex feels, got one over on him by not … Read more
The Feast aka Gwledd
There are several good reasons for watching The Feast, aka Gwledd, and one of the least important is that it’s a horror movie in Welsh, more often seen as a lyrical bardic language of song and poetry rather than blood and dismemberment. But Welsh horror it is, and director Lee Haven Jones gets off to a moody start with some Kubrick-esque glides down the long corridors of the remote modernist house where the action is set. It’s the weekend home to smug Member of Parliament Gwyn (Julian Lewis Jones), his vinegary wife Glenda (Nia Roberts) and his two troubled sons. Gweirydd (Sion Alun Davies) is the more obviously nuts, a fanatical cyclist who … Read more
Henry V
Laurence Olivier didn’t want to direct Henry V. He was nervous about taking it on, what with having no actual directing experience and this being a film hoping to raise British morale during the Second World War (it was part financed by the government). Olivier asked William Wyler, his Wuthering Heights director, to take it on. Wyler declined, and so, later, did Carol Reed. Both told him the same thing – if it’s Shakespeare then it’s got to be you. Oliver screwed up his courage to the sticking place (to borrow a line from Macbeth) and got to work. The result is a magnificent hybrid of the theatrical and the cinematic, with the longest … Read more
