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Impetigore
Impetigore? It’s the English title of a horror movie whose original Indonesian name is Perempuan Tanah Jahanam, so if you’re aiming for authenticity, pile right in. The Trivia section on its IMDb entry helpfully tells us that the word is a conflation of “Impetigo (bacterial infection of the skin that is more common in young children than other ages), and the word Gore (which means violence and bloodshed).” So there we have it – Impetigore – and I can report that, yes, there is a skin condition and children are involved and, yes, there’s gore, plenty of it as this initally moody, sweaty and fascinating film winds towards its increasingly scary close. Things start … Read more
Prayers for the Stolen
Writer/director Tatiana Huezo drops us straight in to Prayers for the Stolen (Noche de Fuego). As a dark screen accompanied by rapid breathing yields to a daytime scene of two females digging what looks like a shallow grave, the internal interrogation starts – Who are these people? Where are they? Is it a grave? Why do they both look so frantic? No voiceover tells us, no “useful idiot” arrives on the scene to act as a conduit from screen to viewer. Huezo forces us to work it out. She’s a director with a background in documentary-making and this adaptation of Jennifer Clement’s best-seller uses a classic technique of the observational style. What makes … Read more
The War Below
War movies cost money, but the team behind The War Below have somehow managed to produce one on the sort of budget that Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk or Peter Jackson’s 1917 probably spent on catering. And they’ve made a decent fist of it. The fascinating and true story it tells is of the British miners recruited during the First World War to break the stalemate at the battle of Messines. Their task was to burrowing out through no-man’s-land and under German lines, lay explosives and blow the enemy position to pieces. Up against the obvious challenges such as unknown terrain and impossible deadlines, the five recruits, all mates of long-standing, are also battling the … Read more
Azor
A Swiss banker arrives in Argentina in 1980 looking for his partner, who’s mysteriously disappeared. Writer/director Andreas Fontana’s debut feature Azor tracks the progress of Ivan de Wiel, which is anything but straightforward, in an oblique, tangential, mood-soaked almost-thriller that’s more about the journey than the destination. Being Argentina in 1980, with a military junta in charge, strict class hierarchies in place and much of the “action” (there’s almost none) taking place in dark corners of colonial hotels where seedy middle aged and old white guys swap favours, the spectre of Graham Greene arises unbidden from the shadows. Ivan de Wiel (Fabrizio Rongione) is your Greene-esque anti-hero, an old-school Swiss banker trying to … Read more
Profile
Profile is a 2018 drama about a journalist who poses online as a teenage Muslim convert from London to strike up a relationship with an Islamist jihadi fighting out in Syria. The immediate suprise of it is that this simple, high concept film rooted in political reality is directed by Timur Bekmambetov, the Russian/Kazakh director who first came to prominence with Night Watch, a supernatural fantasy conceived on a massive scale, with a sizeable cast and a broad canvas. Profile’s first shot is of a Facebook profile, which Amy (Valene Kane) is trying to fill out – what to call herself, how old should she say she is, which part of London does … Read more
The Platform
In The Platform (El Hoyo, in the original Spanish) a man wakes up in a place that isn’t familiar, a place full of dread and fear located in a world that seems to operate by different rules. He may not know where he is, but we know where we are: in one of those high concept “escape room” horror movies, the best of which still remains Vincenzo Natali’s sleek Cube, from 1997, which almost single-handedly kick-started the genre. Almost. Because the real inspiration for these things is Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1944 existentialist play Huis Clos, which follows the discussions of three characters locked together in the same room in the afterlife for all eternity. … Read more
Who You Think I Am
One person stalks another person online in Who You Think I Am (Celle Que Vous Croyez). If it’s not quite as creepy as you might expect, it’s not quite as emotionally engaging as it might be either, which is deliberate. We’re held at arm’s length, while co-writer/director Safy Nebbou gets busy with the mechanics of a plot that reveals all towards the end, and then reveals all one more time. The plot seems quite straightforward. Claire (Juliette Binoche, great as ever) is a teacher of French literature who strikes up a relationship with much younger man Alex, a friend of an ex lover, on a social network we might as well call Facebook, … Read more
Stillwater
There are two stories being told in Stillwater, one well, the other other not so well. Unfortunately for all concerned, it’s the one that’s told not so well that the film insists it’s all about, from its title all the way through to its concluding scenes. At 2 hours 19 minutes you’d have thought that there was time to give both stories a fair screw, but clearly something has happened between greenlighting and debut. That “something” might be lawyers, given what it’s about. Because it’s a loose adaptation of the Amanda Knox story. This was the messy and unsatisfyingly concluded case of the young American woman found guilty of killing a fellow exchange … Read more
The Great Silence
One of the great puzzles about Sergio Corbucci’s 1968 spaghetti western The Great Silence (Il Grande Silenzio) is how shakily it starts. In one gruesomely unsteady shot after another, using lenses that are way too long, cinematographer Silvano Ippoliti appears to be putting on a demonstration of the genre’s technical shortcomings. Distant figures swing wildly all over the frame, rendering action almost impossible to follow. Stick with it, it settles down. By the end, as events build towards a climax that’s satisfying because it’s so unexpected, Ippoliti and Corbucci have relaxed into a groove and are delivering cinematic storytelling at its finest. Scenes play out in as much time as feels necessary, minor … Read more
Minamata
From its title right through to its last gasp, Minamata, a drama based on real events, insists that it isn’t about the photographer W Eugene Smith. But it is. Smith was a photographer who’d distinguished himself in the Second World War and then returned to lay down many of the ground rules of photojournalism at Life magazine, he and it in a creative lockstep from the 1940s till the 1970s, when it ceased weekly publication and he went on to the great darkroom in the sky. The film picks up Smith at the end of his career in 1971: old, drunk, broke, selling off his gear to pay his rent and barely able … Read more
Beasts Clawing at Straws
Beasts Clawing at Straws also goes by the English-language title of Beasts That Cling to the Straw but Rats in a Sack would also be a useful way of translating its original Korean title. It’s a story about different sets of people, all connected by a Louis Vuitton holdall full of cash, which we first see in the movie’s opening shot. Then, in 1960s heist-movie opening-credit style, the camera follows the holdall at its level while an unidentified someone carries it to a left luggage locker and leaves it there. As the movie ends, the bag is once again picked up and the camera follows it, again at bag height, off out onto … Read more
Ikiru
Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru is now old enough – it was released in 1952 – for people to be able to consider it rationally. Almost from the moment it hit the screens it was treated as Kurosawa’s “triumph”, one of the best films ever made, regularly turning up on Sight and Sound magazine’s influential once-a-decade poll of the best movies ever made. Recently, though, it’s slipped a bit. In 1962 it was number 20 on S&S‘s list. By 2012 it’s “only” at number 136, well behind Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (17) and Rashomon (24). A 2016 article in the UK’s Daily Telegraph listing its top 10 most overrated films of all time placed Ikiru at … Read more
