Latest Posts
The Avengers: Series 1, Episode 20 – Tunnel of Fear
For a long time it was thought that only a couple of episodes from series one of The Avengers had survived. And then Tunnel of Fear turned up in a “private film collection”, as the press release guardedly puts it, swelling the number of complete episodes from two to a mighty three out of a possible 26. There’s about a third of the very first episode, Hot Snow, too – reviewed here. We might not have the full run of the season but with Tunnel of Fear we now have enough to get a sketchy impression of the direction of the show. Hot Snow in first position establishing David Keel (Ian Hendry) as a … Read more
Together
Together is a select member of a new genre – the Covid Drama – and sees Sharon Horgan back working again with Dennis Kelly. Together they co-wrote Pulling, the TV relationship comedy that made both their names. Kelly went on to create and write the TV conspiracy thriller Utopia and Horgan to co-write the popular comedy series Catastrophe. This time around he writes, she acts (though you can’t rule out the possibility that there’s a fair amount of improvising going on too). Flipping the actual experience of many people – who found that the whole Covid experience (particularly the lockdowns in the UK) caused their relationship to buckle – Together is a funny/angry examination of a married … Read more
1448 Love Among Us
In the 2014 Thai film 1448 Love Among Us, both the “1448” and the “Us” of the title are significant, the former the section of the Thai penal code restricting marriage to heterosexual people and the latter an indicator that this film is very much a movie for domestic consumption. Even so, for drama lovers there’s enough in here to slake the thirst, while issue-seekers are more obviously catered for. The opening shot sets the tone – two pretty young women in bridal white getting married to each other, in a ceremony presided over by an official who has her reservations but who wishes Pim (Apinya Sakuljaroensuk) and Pat (Isabella Lete) well, as … Read more
Yes, God, Yes
Yes, God, Yes – a funny title pithily catching the twin obsessions of this slight but sharp movie. Sex and god. It stars Natalia Dyer, who somehow has managed to fit this in alongside the nine other movies and 30-odd episodes of the Netflix show Stranger Things she’s appeared in over the last six years or so. She was about 24 when she made this, but the big eyes and slender frame mean she can just about get away with playing Alice, a teenager from a sheltered background grappling with the first stirrings of sexuality at the Catholic school that seems almost unnaturally fixated on the carnal. Coming of agers with storylines that … Read more
Cryptozoo
Independent, hand-drawn, adult animation is rare, as Sundance programmer Charlie Sextro said at the premiere of Cryptozoo, which puts Dash Shaw’s busy and quirky adventure in pretty much the same category as its subject matter. A cryptid, an early intertitle card informs us, is a creature whose existence is unsubstantiated, or who remains hidden. As in a cryptic crossword, you have to look beyond the surface to see what is really there. And a cryptozoo is where our hero, Lauren (voiced by Lake Bell) is employed as a kind of Indiana Jones swashbuckler, travelling the world to bring crypto-animals like the velue, the gorgon and the karzelek back to the zoo, where they’ll … Read more
Cry Macho
Cry Macho is the latest instalment in the Clint Eastwood series of movies you could loosely call the “old guy’s last hurrah”. Like Gran Torino and The Mule, it’s a moment to be reminded of past glories as well as be entertained, all the while marvelling at at Eastwood’s remarkable career and long life. Clint Eastwood was 90 when he was making this film and at an age when many people are being spoonfed, he is starring, directing and producing. He also writes some of the instrumental music. He appears in every scene. Like most late-period Eastwood movies starring the man himself, this is as much about the Eastwood myth behind as well … Read more
The Boy Who Turned Yellow
The Boy Who Turned Yellow is interesting for all sorts of reasons. Released in 1972, it was the final film of both director Michael Powell and screenwriter Emeric Pressburger, the powerhouse duo who’d been responsible for some of the UK’s most innovative, technically brilliant, thematically complex and entertaining films. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, A Matter of Life and Death, Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes are probably the biggest successes in a partnership that lasted from 1939’s The Spy in Black (“the most exciting spy melodrama since the advent of the Second World War,” opined the New York Times) to 1957’s Ill Met by Moonlight aka Night Ambush (Powell himself … Read more
Les Misérables
The title Les Misérables is now so associated with the musical that it’s often hard to remember that it was originally a novel by Victor Hugo, and an immensely significant one at that. Surely, bearing the book, the musical and various film adaptations of both in mind, writer director Ladj Ly must have had qualms about calling his film that. But he went ahead anyway and here’s the result, a bravado piece of dramatic film-making that not only justifies Ly’s use of the title but also validates his chutzpah. Hugo’s masterpiece often translates as The Miserables, The Wretched, The Dispossessed and The Wretched Poor, and Ly finds the modern equivalents of Hugo bread-stealing … Read more
Worth
Worth is a film about 9/11 and its aftermath and if you were about on that day and old enough to take in what was going on you might feel there’s little reason to watch it… The shock was so intense and keenly felt that 2001 still seems so present, no reminder necessary, thanks. There might be political qualms too (the endless War on Terror, the ill-justified war in Iraq). And there might also be the suspicion that Worth is going to be… worthy. While it’s never going to put all those concerns back in their box, Worth turns out to be an adroit, astute, brilliantly conceived and played procedural drama in the All … Read more
The Voyeurs
Sydney Sweeney’s big eyes and impressive breasts both work hard in The Voyeurs, a trashy thriller designed to titillate even as it vaguely warns of the perils of being too interested in what other people get up to. As is often the way with these things, a hearty interest in what other people get up to is actually The Voyeurs‘ raison d’etre. It starts with one of those grand cinematic establishing shots of a cityscape, the camera gradually zooming in, in, in, onto a street, a shop, then dissolving the window separating outside from inside, before advancing still further into this boutique selling lingerie, and towards a changing cubicle where Sweeney can just … Read more
The Secret Garden
The world may not need yet another version of The Secret Garden, but here’s one anyway. The latest adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s children’s story is in a crowded field and to cut through has to compete with two very respectable adaptations, the much lauded one from 1993 directed by Agnieszka Holland and the one from 1949 starring cute child star Margaret O’Brien. There are plenty of others, going as far back as 1919, and what all have in common is the same roster of character names – one sign of something achieving classic status is that no one dicks about with the names as written on the page. See Harry Potter, Elizabeth … Read more
Macbeth
In 1971, less than two years after his wife, Sharon Tate, and unborn child had been murdered by Charles Manson and his mad followers, Roman Polanski went to work on his version of Macbeth (aka The Tragedy of Macbeth). “Exorcising the demons” is how the result is often described. Whether you buy into the pop psychology or not, this commercial flop is a bloody and brutal film, and a remarkably powerful one – direct, cinematic, taut and… yes… bloody. Polanski got in Kenneth Tynan – at the time the UK’s most famous critic, the literary manager at the National Theatre and infamous as the first man to say “fuck” on British television – to help … Read more
