Latest Posts
Ghosts of War
Ghosts of War is part of a recent wave of war movies with a supernatural flavour, slotting neatly alongside the likes of 2018’s Overlord (a funny macabre “Nazis do the weirdest things” near-miss produced by JJ Abrams), Frankenstein’s Army (a knowingly ridiculous 2013 film in which, at one point, one of the Baron’s descendant attempts to splice together a communist and Nazi brain). And Dead Snow, which featured Undead Nazis and had one of the best taglines of recent years – “Ein. Zwei. Die”. Before launching its assault, writer/director Eric Bress’s film takes time establishing its bona fides as a proper war movie. Normandy 1944, a group of five soldiers are on a take-no-prisoners … Read more
Matthias & Maxime
Because it’s a Xavier Dolan film, Matthias & Maxime has to be approached as if it were a bomb liable to go off any minute – his films often do. We meet the two guys, friends since childhood, on a rowdy weekend away at a lake house where they’re about to take part in another friend’s movie. They’ve been roped in slightly against their will by the incredibly irritating Erika (Camille Felton), whose French keeps lapsing in a faux casual way into hipsterish English, “whatevs” and the like. And so here Matt (Gabriel D’Almeida Freitas) and Max (Xavier Dolan) are acting out a key scene. The movie is all about sexually fluid relationships … Read more
The Court Jester
A flop, amazingly, when it was first released in 1955, The Court Jester is pretty much perfect in every way. It has the looks, the jokes, the action and the stars, in particular a perfectly cast Danny Kaye doing what he does best. There are stories of Kaye holding theatre audiences spellbound just sitting on the edge of the stage and reminiscing, and his ability (or perhaps his need) to command attention suits him perfectly to the role of a carnival entertainer using his talents to save the realm. The wicked King Roderick (Cecil Parker) has usurped the rightful ruler and killed the royal family. All except the infant prince, identifiable by a … Read more
Radioactive
Radioactive is a biopic, and Marie Curie is its subject. An interesting proposition – most people know the name Curie but who knows anything about the actual woman? She discovered radiation, or radium, or X rays, or something, the general level of ignorance about Curie’s life making the default of the biopic – leaping from one headline event to the next – impossible. It sets writer Jack Thorne, director Marjane Satrapi and, to a slightly lesser extent, actor Rosamund Pike free to do what they want. And what they want to do is celebrate the woman as a force of nature, a scientific marvel, a tireless worker and an iconoclast who took on the … Read more
Denmark
Denmark (aka One Way to Denmark) doesn’t look immediately like a remake of the 1949 movie The History of Mr Polly, because it isn’t. But it has roughly the same plot shape and is dealing in the same sort of feelgood, which after the picture of woe it’s painted in its setup, feels entirely welcome. Mr Polly saw the miserable and passive Polly (John Mills) – locked in a loveless marriage and living a life he hated running a draper’s shop – given a second chance of happiness in the figure of a warm, lovely woman who runs an idyllic inn beside a picturesque river. It worked so well in 1949 (and still … Read more
The Assistant
“It’s about Harvey Weinstein,” is how The Assistant is often shorthanded. Yes, but no. At a basic level Kitty Green’s bracingly edgy film really is about an assistant at a movie production house ruled over by a predatory tycoon. At another it’s about the way low-status individuals – women in this case – are treated in general. It’s not all sexual misconduct either. The Assistant makes it clear, even from the weak position of those two words on the screen in the opening credits (bottom right, the last stop on the eyes’ journey) that status bleeds into every aspect of human relations. Take the early scene where the rookie assistant, Jane, is silently waiting … Read more
The Rental
Take your pick – The Rental is a deliberately confounding amalgam of genres or a film that can’t work out what it wants to be. It starts out looking like one of those cabin in the woods things, and we meet two couples – Charlie (Dan Stevens) and Michelle (Alison Brie), Josh (Jeremy Allen White) and Mina (Sheila Vand) – as they’re arriving at a secluded and fabulous place by the coast, complete with ocean view and hot tub. They also have a dog in tow, which the rules of the rental explicitly forbid. But they’re entitled “white privilege” kind of guys and so those rules don’t apply. Actually, one of them, Mina, isn’t white … Read more
Pinocchio
To the question: Is there a canonical Pinocchio I can enjoy in movie form, the answer is “Yes, this one by Matteo Garrone”. It takes Carlo Collodi’s story back to its origins – it’s about a lump of magic wood being carved into a talking puppet by poor woodcarver Gepetto, and then the puppet setting out on a string of adventures all the while wishing he could make the next fantastical leap and become a real boy. There is no shortage of competition, from a 1911 silent version, through the Disney’s 1940 version to countless others, like the 1957 one starring Mickey Rooney or the 2002 one directed by and starring Roberto Benigni, … Read more
Hope Gap
About as unfashionable as they come, Hope Gap has two and a half great actors in it and tells a tender story with great compassion. It’s an adaptation of writer/director William Nicholson’s play The Retreat from Moscow and though Nicholson throws in scenes set on the cliffs and by the sea as often as possible, in an attempt to cinematify things, this is obviously a chamber piece that doesn’t in any case need them. Instead it gets its power from the gulf between what is said and what is unsaid, and the interaction of the two. The two great actors are Annette Bening and Bill Nighy, playing a long married couple called Grace … Read more
The Love of Jeanne Ney
The Love of Jeanne Ney is one of those torrid love stories told against a backdrop of roiling conflict. Or that’s what it looks like at the outset. But by the end it’s become more like a showcase for everything the great Austrian director Georg Wilhelm Pabst could do – all the genres in all the styles. By this point in his career, Pabst had given Greta Garbo her first starring role two years before in 1925’s Joyless Street (aka Die freudlose Gasse). Two years later he would turn Louise Brooks into a global icon with Pandora’s Box. If Jeanne Ney was a bit of bait designed to lure Hollywood into hiring him, … Read more
Possession
Gird your loins, and probably best to stap your vitals while you’re at it, because it’s Possession, the 1981 movie showcasing one of the most remarkable displays of unhinged acting you’re ever likely to see, with Isabelle Adjani doing the frothing up, and leaving co-star Sam Neill trailing in her wake. This odd film got caught up in the video nasty debacle in the UK, where it was seen as a horror movie and got banned outright. A similarly negative outcome awaited it in the US, where over 30 minutes of footage was cut to make the film suitable for midnight movie audiences, destroying it in the process. It’s not a horror film, … Read more
Le Deuxième Souffle
The title of Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1966 gangster drama Le Deuxième Souffle is often translated as The Second Wind, though The Last Gasp would also work pretty well, since it’s a story about a career criminal breaking out of jail and trying to get out of France with his woman. Stuck for cash, the fugitive takes part in a “one last job” heist, which does indeed turn out to be his one last job. Lino Ventura plays the criminal Gu, short for Gustave, so ruthless a character that Melville puts up a disclaimer before the film that he personally does not condone any of the actions that the audience are about to see on … Read more
