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The Killing of Two Lovers
The Killing of a Two Lovers starts, unusually, with a climax, backs off quite a bit to let us work out what’s going on, before returning with another climax at the end, exactly where we’d expect one to be. It opens with two people in bed asleep. Hovering over them is a bearded man with a desperate look on his face and a gun in his hand. He hears a noise from somewhere else in the house, takes fright and climbs out the ground-floor window and makes good his escape. The two people sleep on unawares, while we head out with David, the desperate guy, and find out more about him. The film … Read more
The Man in the Hat
The Man in the Hat is a weird whimsical hybrid: a homage to Jacques Tati and a semi-musical travelogue in a fantasy version of France. In The Man in a Hat‘s France there is no fast food, no Japanese cars, no smartphones. The car The Man drives is a Fiat 500, the original, tiny, tin-boxy version not the more chi-chi modern one. He jumps into it sharpish after the opening scene, when The Man (as the credits call him) spots a gang of unsavoury gentlemen heaving something human-shaped into the sea one balmy evening. They’d not realised he was there, enjoying a glass of wine and a plate of something tasty outside a … Read more
Undergods
A strange and evocative film, Undergods is a portmanteau fantasy horror with the seams sanded flat and then caulked in an attempt to hide the joins. Even so, it falls into clearly discernible distinct chunks, which seemingly bear little relation to each other. First up, K and Z, a pair of post-apocalyptic dealers in humans, dead for meat, live as slaves. Then on to the story of a man whose life is invaded by a stranger, who is soon sleeping with his wife in his own home. Then on to a bedtime story told by a father to his daughter. The story itself comes next, of a “merchant” stealing a mysterious thin man’s … Read more
Oxygen
The amazingly up-down career of director Alexandre Aja hits a peak with Oxygen, a brilliantly conceived and executed piece of high-concept sci-fi calling on all Aja’s skills as a manipulator of tension, a master of genre, a technical whizz. Whether it’s his breakthrough, Switchblade Romance, or his deliberately schlocky Piranha 3D (featuring the memorable line “They took my penis”), Aja’s at his best working from a good screenplay. Oxygen’s is by first-timer Christie LeBlanc and is very strong – structurally taut, plausible and building gradually in pace. Paragraph three and I haven’t said what it’s about yet. It’s very simple. A woman wakes up in a dark box. When the lights come up … Read more
Pink Wall
Tom Cullen is best known as an actor and his writing/directing debut, Pink Wall, owes something to the screen work he’s best known for – Andrew Haigh’s Weekend (Downton Abbey fans might disagree). So, yes, it’s the story of a couple on the cusp of something which also manages to sum up, to an extent, what it’s like to be their age – around 30, when youthful dalliances start solidifying into something more lasting, long-term plans are being made and thoughts turn to having kids. In relationship terms, Pink Wall is about that moment when it’s time to shit or get off the pot. The other film Pink Wall owes something to is … Read more
Just Mercy
Just Mercy continues writer/director Destin Daniel Cretton’s zig-zag up the movie food chain. His breakthrough came in 2013’s Short Term 12, which not only made his own name but also that of Brie Larson, who is now playing Captain Marvel at god knows what hourly rate of pay. Trouper that she is, she turns out for Cretton again here, as she did in his last film, 2017’s The Glass Castle, though here she’s in a minor, supporting role to star Michael B Jordan. Just Mercy tells a true story, of a smalltime lumber guy, Walter McMillian, known locally as Johnny D, who was picked up by the cops for the murder of a … Read more
New Order
Michel Franco’s latest movie, New Order, opens with a scene of sick people in hospital being forcibly removed from their beds so that people who have been seriously injured in some affray out on the streets can take have them instead. Up come the credits, and the title and the actors’ names are all jumbly – backwards lettering, everything out of place – but then we settle into what looks like a familiar scene. A high end wedding. The bride and groom (to be, the ceremony hasn’t quite happened) kissing, their parents clucking about, drinks being handed around. Guests arriving and being greeted. Small talk. Behind the scenes the staff beaver away. And … Read more
Quo Vadis, Aida?
Jasmila Zbanic’s powerful drama Quo Vadis, Aida?, about the Srebrenica massacre in 1995, starts with a sad irony. As the production company idents come up, and various “with the support of” and “in collaboration with” credits list all the European and international organisations involved, remember that when the events in this flm were playing out in real life actual international collaboration seemed to consist of a collective looking the other way. Ask most people, most Europeans even, what the last war in Europe was and they’ll likely refer you to Adolf Hitler. That’s to forget the Bosnian war in the aftermath of the fragmentation of Yugoslavia – familiar as a holiday destination to so … Read more
Shorta aka Enforcement
Shorta (this film’s original Danish title) is the Arabic word for police. Enforcement is how it’s being sold in the rest of the world, as in “law enforcement”, but the truncation adds an extra shot of aggressiveness that’s entirely right for a boiled-in-piss drama all about the grrr. The opening shot sets the tone – a close-up of a black kid struggling to survive a chokehold administered by the cops. When the kid later dies, the no-go estates where kids like him live erupt and two cops find themselves in enemy territory as tension boils over into violent unrest. Jens Høyer (Simon Sears) and Mike Andersen (Jacob Lohmann) are the two cops, on … Read more
The Disciple
If you want it enough you can have it. Believe. Be passionate. Follow your dream. Movies are often insistent on this point. The Disciple begs to differ. You wouldn’t guess from his face, but Sharad (Aditya Modak) has it all. He plays raags, as this Mahrathi-language film calls them, ragas, most likely, if you’re an English speaker. His guru (Aran Dravid) is highly respected, deeply knowledgeable, kindly and technically supremely skilled. And as we can see in The Disciple’s opening scene, he also has talent. In flashback to Sharad’s childhood we see a supporting, nurturing home life, with a loving mother. And if Sharad’s passionate, inspiring father is a touch cajoling in his … Read more
Stalker
Time to rewatch Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, I thought, having recently seen Abel Ferrara’s Siberia (2019) and Gan Bi’s Long Day’s Journey into Night (2018), and noticed how influenced both were by the 1979 film. As so many films are. Going backwards in time, just grabbing almost at random, there’s Stephen Fingleton’s amazing The Survivalist (2015), Alexey German’s Hard to Be a God (2015), Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia (2011) and Andrey Zvyangintsev’s The Return (2003). Almost all of Terrence Malick’s films owe a lot to Tarkovsky in general and Stalker in particular. Seminal, an overused term, is appropriate here. Let’s also mention Blade Runner, which appeared in 1982, three years after Stalker. While there … Read more
The Outside Story
Brian Tyree Henry goes from second string actor to star in The Outside Story. He’s probably best known from the TV series Atlanta, which has acted as a finishing school for talents including LaKeith Stanfield and Zazie Beetz. More recently you might have seen Henry’s face in Godzilla vs. Kong, as a nerdy conspiracy theorist. Writer/director Casimir Nozowski also gets an upgrade, having made a number of New York-centric shorts and directed a reality foodie show – and you can see the influence of both in The Outside Story. After a year of various levels of lockdowns, Henry is playing a character who’ll be familiar to many, as the video editor whose laptop-based … Read more
