Latest Posts
Deadfall
Remember Eric Bana in Chopper, frightening everyone to death as Australia’s most gruesomely violent criminal, Mark “Chopper” Read? There are echoes of Bana the Bad in Deadfall, in which he plays one half of a psycho sibling pair who are heading, unwittingly as far as they and everyone else concerned can tell, for a showdown rendezvous at a Thanksgiving dinner. Deadfall isn’t half as good as Chopper, though it does give Bana a chance to show us he can still do ugly. If only writer Zach Dean and director Stefan Ruzowitzky had worked out some way of telling the other four stories they’re trying to tell with economy, leaving Bana with more screen … Read more
Dans Paris
Since The Beat That My Heart Skipped, Romain Duris has been pretty much the hottest name in French cinema. There’s plenty of opportunity for him to do some high intensity scowling in this claustrophobic drama about a family whose secret, its driving force, is depression. His dad (the excellent Guy Marchand) is clearly wrestling with it, his brother (Louis Garrel) has flown off in the other direction and is banging anything female that moves and now Paul (Duris) is in deep trouble too. There’s a bad attack of the narrative cutes at the outset of Christophe Honoré’s latest film, when Garrel turns to the camera and addresses it directly. But give the film … Read more
Fracture
Anthony Hopkins plays the cat to Ryan Gosling’s mouse in this glossy thriller from Gregory Hoblit, whose CV (including 1996’s Primal Fear and 2002’s Hart’s War) demonstrates he’s a slick journeyman. Hopkins is the wealthy Irish-American engineer who’s flagrantly killed his wife but has so arranged things that the case against him appears to be falling apart in the courtroom, in spite of the fact he was found with the weapon in his hand and has fessed up. Can public prosecutor Willy Beachum (Ryan Gosling) nail him? The film is more a howdunit than a whodunit, and ingenious enough, though Fracture does come with its own faultlines. There’s simply not enough Hopkins, and … Read more
Dick Van Dyke on DVD
What a great thing Dick Van Dyke has been. First there’s that improbable name. Even more improbable, it’s his real name. Then there’s his legs, long and lean and made for comedy dancing and comedy pratfalls. And his smile – as wide as the screen and surely the biggest on TV, if we’re not counting that of Mary Tyler Moore, who played his screen wife. We tend to think of him as a TV performer – no less than three TV series have been named after him, including the seminal Dick Van Dyke Show of the 1960s, the direct descendants of which (via Mary Tyler Moore and James Burrows) are Friends and The Big … Read more
Straightheads aka Closure
Yet another Danny Dyer movie in which he plays a flaky spliffer. And another, like Outlaw, in which he’s involved in vigilantism of a particularly unpleasant sort. This one, though, co-stars Gillian Anderson as the posh totty Dyer ends up bedding after installing CCTV equipment at her pad. And then, after she’s invited him out to a party at a swish country house, the pair are set upon on the drive back to town. He is horribly beaten up, she is brutally raped. But hang on – Danny Dyer? Gillian Anderson? No, it doesn’t seem right somehow but Anderson has a habit of turning up in some odd corners. And in Straightheads actually work … Read more
What Is an Aseptic White Room Thriller?
The simple answer to the question “what is an aseptic white room thriller” (AWRT) is Cube, Vincenzo Natali’s cult Canadian sci-fi movie from 1997. More abstractly, it’s a film that takes place on a single set, usually white though not necessarily. Lighting will be clean, clinical, fairly devoid of shadow. Soundtrack music will be scarce or absent. As for sound design, a background hum of air-conditioning is standard. Clanking, the whooshing of doors, “noises off”. It’s the plot that is most definitive. In the AWRT no one really knows what’s going on. Typically the film opens with the characters who don’t know each other waking up somewhere far from home, to find that … Read more
McCabe and Mrs Miller
As Ang Lee now redefines every genre he touches, so did Robert Altman three and more decades ago. Here’s his remodelling of the western, an “anti-western” according to him, though these days what Altman was doing decades ago has mostly been incorporated in the mainstream – the “anti-western” is now just a western. Warren Beatty and Julie Christie take the leads – he a lousy entrepreneur with a plan to build a whorehouse, she a Cockney madam with an opium habit and a determination to make McCabe succeed in the enterprise they agree to jointly undertake. They sleep together but she charges him top dollar. It’s that sort of relationship and that sort of … Read more
The Puffy Chair
Here’s a simple story about Josh (Mark Duplass), his needy girlfriend (Kathryn Aselton), Josh’s hippie-dip brother (Rhett Wilkins) and their cross-country journey to take collection of an overstuffed couch-potato chair they just bought on ebay, and take it to the guys’ dad (played by Duplass’s dad, Larry Duplass). Shot for $10,000 by first-timers, this is one of the handful of films first to be called “mumblecore” – Wikipedia tells me that the term was first applied at the South by Southwest Film Festival in 2005 to a trio of films – this one, Joe Swanberg’s Kissing on the Mouth, and Mutual Appreciation by Andrew Bujalski (often called “the father of mumblecore”) But how … Read more
Accused aka Anklaget
Finally being given a wider release to capitalise on Sofie Gråbøl’s profile, courtesy of Scandi-crime series The Killing, this Danish drama about a man accused of incest is a brooding drama with an unusually tight focus and a real knack for cranking up the tension. Having mentioned Gråbøl, I must now immediately jump in and point out that she is not the star. And good though she is, the focus of this intense drama is Troels Lyby, who is great as you watch him. In retrospect you realise just how great. I am using words like “brooding”, “intense”, “tight” and “focus” because that is the entire point of the film. From start to … Read more
6 May 2013-05-06
Out in the UK this week The Impossible (Entertainment One, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) The Spanish have an appetite for mutilation. Look at bullfighting, or the bloody effigies of the crucified Jesus Christ in their churches. And though this film is entirely in the English language, it has a Spanish director, writer and production money behind it. It’s very much a Spanish film. So, parking my misgivings about a drama wrought from the 2004 tsunami in the bay marked “Anglo Saxon squeamishness”, let’s turn to the story of the nice family who copped the big wave while on holiday in Thailand. It’s based on a Spanish family’s true experiences and does at least put … Read more
Human Traffic
Human Traffic made a hell of a feature debut for its writer and director Justin Kerrigan at the back end of the 20th century. A pill-popping tale of a mad weekend among McJobbers in Cardiff, Wales, it’s a film unashamed, delighted in fact, to bring us drug-taking as it is experienced by those who do it most – from Friday night euphoria to Sunday comedown – as fun, an escape, a lark. We’re talking about ecstasy, this being 1999, and the film was so of the moment that the UK newspaper The Guardian called it “the last great film of the nineties”. The paper was rushing on its own euphoria but there is an … Read more
The Breed
Five horny college kids head off to an idyllic island for a weekend of booze and death in this tiredly formulaic horror film which subjects the isolated 20somethings to violent interaction with dogs – German shepherds, to be precise. To spend more time on the plot than is strictly necessary, it seems that someone has genetically fiddled with the dogs’ minds, making them super-intelligent and super-angry. Though not, it would seem, constantly so. Which gives our buff crew time to get drunk, have a laugh, and get into their bikinis (not the boys, obviously). After wondering when the black guy (Hill Harper) is going to die, you might also ask yourself what function exactly … Read more
