Latest Posts
Into the Labyrinth
Dustin Hoffman and Toni Servillo in the same film? Into the Labyrinth (aka L’uomo del labirinto) is a properly intriguing prospect. Hoffman a madness-in-his-Method actor since his breakthrough in 1967’s The Graduate, Servillo the king of the hangdog deapan – or is that the deadpan hangdog? – and long-time collaborator with Paolo Sorrentino (in films like The Great Beauty and The Consequences of Love). Before you get too excited, they share only one scene together, and that’s right at the end, an afterthought possibly tacked on to give the publicity machine more to work with (and I’ve obliged by using the resulting picture). The two actors inhabit entirely different filmic universes, united only … Read more
Mickey One
Old Hollywood meets new in Mickey One, a neglected thriller from 1965 directed by Arthur Penn and starring Warren Beatty, both of whom would upend the cosy certainties of a sclerotic industry with Bonnie and Clyde two years later. They run through a few of the possibilities here. The film focuses almost entirely on Beatty, as a club comedian and light-entertainment guy who goes on the run from the Mob after getting on the wrong side of them over money, a woman, and possibly a few other things. Mickey One is what the fugitive ends up being called after assuming the identity of a turned-over vagrant, “One” being as near as most people … Read more
Giant Little Ones
Franky is a buff swimmer and from the moment Giant Little Ones kicks off it seems fairly certain, from the way the camera is lingering on his upper body as he wakes up in the morning, that it’s a gay drama we’re watching. Why a camera can’t have a female gaze, I don’t know. Discuss. Anyhow, Franky is popular with the other guys in the swim team, has a girlfriend “with a fine rack” according to one of his friends, and what’s more she’s very keen to lose her virginity and Franky seems like the guy to do it. All this changes after Franky’s birthday and a late-night, very drunken, stoned fumble with … Read more
Yes Day
Yes Day not only stars Jennifer Garner but it’s produced by her. It’s her film. It’s another of those goofy family comedies that seem to be her default, the sort of film she returns to when she fancies some more of the 13 Going On 30 action – pop culture-y, adults doing kid stuff, silly, sentimental, a touch magical. It wastes no time getting its offer onto the screen. By 15 minutes in we’ve met Allison (Garner) and Carlos (Edgar Ramirez), two life-affirming novelty-accepting “Yes” people who have got married and discovered that parenting is more about saying “No” – don’t stick your fingers in that socket etc – to the point that their three … Read more
Rose Plays Julie
Rose Plays Julie arrives on screens an entire year late. I have an email from January 2020 telling me it would be out in “Spring 2020”, but here we are in Spring 2021, after a year of slippage. Presumably directors Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy were waiting for the cinemas to re-open and eventually gave up. I’m glad they did. This is a brilliant film, and while it probably would suit the claustrophobic murk of a big theatre, the confines of a living room don’t do it too much harm. “These are operatic film makers in search of a bigger better subject,” is what I wrote in my notes for Mister John, the … Read more
Lucky
And so, Lucky, a gigantically ironic title for a film about a woman being stalked night after night in her own home. It stars Brea Grant, who also wrote it, and until recently I’d not heard of her. But there she was just a few weeks back in After Midnight, Jeremy Gardner’s cute, smart, smallscale horror film about a man being stalked night after night in his own home – she played Gardner’s wife – and now here she is in what could be called a companion piece. Both films make use of the massive film-making infrastructure of the West Coast – technicians who just know how to do stuff quickly and properly … Read more
Moffie
Strange film, Moffie. As if Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket had been crossed with Claire Denis’s Beau Travail, the brutal training discipline of the former with the shimmering lust-in-the-dust poetics of the latter. But first the first – it’s 1981, we’re in South Africa, and the apartheid regime, not content with waging war at home, is conscripting its young men to do two years national service to fight wars against “communists” (ie black people) on its borders. As the film opens we meet Nick van der Swart (Kai Luke Brümmer), a nice-looking lad taking leave of his family and heading off to do his time in army fatigues. The atmosphere is Full Metal … Read more
Better Days
Better Days is a Chinese film about love, bullying, suicide, rape and murder… but mostly love. Adapted from a Young Adult novel (by Xi Jiuyue), it uses the relationship between a prim high school girl and a thug from the wrong side of the tracks as its skeleton key to access other, more off-limits areas of social import. Don’t worry if you’re only interested in the love story, though, because that’s what Better Days is mostly interested in too, in spite of its protestations. Which start early on with the suicide of a pupil who throws herself from several floors up into the internal courtyard below at the school where Chen Nian (Zhou … Read more
So Pretty
I started out watching So Pretty convinced it was “not for me” but by the time it had finished I wondered if I was precisely its target audience. Me? Gammon-faced guy whose exposure to trans culture extends about as far as an evening in Soho’s (London) infamous drag bar Madame JoJo’s once, quite a while ago, to celebrate someone’s birthday. I got drunk. Who knows if anyone there was even trans. So Pretty starts with a shot of Franz (Thomas Love) picking up Tonia (Jessica Dunn Rovinelli, as Jessie Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli, unpick at will) at the airport. Franz is a lithe gay young man with long hair. Tonia is a trans woman … Read more
Apples
Apples makes clear that, even in 2021, the Greek Weird Wave continues to roll. A retro-scifi story of a world afflicted by an illness that robs people of their memories, it stars Aris Servetalis as Aris (handy), a man who leaves his home one day and then, suddenly, is sitting on the bus unable to answer basic questions like “where are you going?” or “what is your name?” The prognosis appears to be bad. In this world, once the memory has gone it can’t come back. And so Aris winds up in a medical program designed to give him new memories. He’s given a place to live and is asked to follow a … Read more
100 Years of… The Three Musketeers
You’d have thought that the silent The Three Musketeers from 1921 would be the first film adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’s novel but it wasn’t. Depending on how you count these things it was around the seventh or eighth film version since 1903. It wasn’t even the first of 1921. That honour went to a French serial shot in 14 episodes, Les Trois Mousketaires. But this one, directed by Fred Niblo and starring Douglas Fairbanks Sr, eclipses all the forerunners and most of the successors, largely thanks to the presence of Fairbanks, cusping 40 when he made this but leaping around and larger than life from the moment he hits the screen. This happens … Read more
The Last Vermeer
The Last Vermeer is the true story of Han Van Meegeren, art forger extraordinaire, who knocked out old masters by the likes of Frans Hals, Pieter de Hooch and Johannes Vermeer, among others, during the Second World War and even managed to sell a “Vermeer” to Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring for a fortune. Van Meegeren was initially brought to trial in the Netherlands after the War for having sold Göring what was supposed to be a real Vermeer, as a collaborator who had facilitated the expropriation of the cultural property of the Netherlands. But when he eventually admitted that the picture was fake, those charges were dropped. However, because of the skewed logic of … Read more
