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The Promised Land
Mads Mikkelsen is a reassuring presence in any movie and is the making of The Promised Land (Bastarden in the original Danish), a movie that promises much and eventually delivers too much, but stylishly, always stylishly. He plays Ludvig Kahlen, an 18th-century ex-soldier who petitions the Danish king to allow him to cultivate the Jutland Heath, a vast expanse of the country on which nothing, a preamble tells us, will grow. His petition is accepted by the courtiers who act as an intermediary between the Kahlen and the monarch. It’s one of the drunken king’s crazy schemes, this turning of the wilderness into farmland, and the courtiers reason that by agreeing to Kahlen’s … Read more
The Manchurian Candidate
Thrillers generally work backwards, towards who done it or why. The Manchurian Candidate doesn’t do it that way at all. We know that something’s wrong from the opening scenes of John Frankenheimer’s superbly chilly Cold War thriller, but we’ve no idea where everything is headed. And Frankenheimer keeps it that way until the film’s dying (literally) moments. The Day of the Jackal borrowed quite a bit of The Manchurian Candidate’s cold deliberate approach, but we always knew that the hitman in that movie was aiming to assassinate French president Charles de Gaulle. Here we know next to nothing, though early scenes make clear that a platoon of US soldiers in Korea has been … Read more
Marmalade
A clever one-two of a movie, Marmalade starts out looking like one thing, then turns into something else, but saves its best moves for the finale, when revelations come tumbling out at a rate of knots. What it looks like is one of those dweeby, comic coming-of-agers of the early 2000s, movies like Elizabethtown or Garden State, in which uptight milquetoast guys are given an injection of va-va-voom by a force-of-nature free-spirit female. The creation of the passive, sex-starved male writer, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl – one dimensional, a catalyst in someone else’s story rather than a hero in her own and just incidentally as hot as lava – was so ubiquitous … Read more
Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies under America
I’m not sure why there aren’t more movies like Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies under America. To make one all you need is some found footge – real found footage, not stuff you faked – an edit suite and a voiceover. Plus ideas. This strange movie from 1992 is a collage of bits and pieces that writer/director Craig Baldwin got his hands on when, according to Wikipedia, lots of film works were being “discarded by institutions changing to VHS” (who would discard film for VHS, makes no sense at all). Baldwin snapped up bits of pieces of celluloid heading for the dumpster and headed off to make his film with them, picking up Sean Kilkoyne … Read more
Trenque Lauquen
Long films are often thought to have something profound to say. I’m not sure Trenque Lauquen does, unless you’re counting what it has to say about the act or art of cinema itself. Philosophically there might not be too much going on here but artistically this is a remarkable film. Cahiers du Cinéma named this as their best film of 2023. It’s four hours and 22 minutes long, before we go any further, and a detective thriller kind of thing, opening with two men searching for a woman, then flashing back to tell the story of the missing woman and one of the men, all the while alluding even further back, to a … Read more
Ghost in the Shell
1995’s Ghost in the Shell was meant to be the Japanese anime that cracked the world market wide open. It didn’t work, but that’s not to say it wasn’t successful in its own way. A slew of sequels, TV shows and eventually a highly contested Hollywood remake followed (on account of Scarlett Johansson playing its lead character), and it was also influential on James Cameron, who namechecked it as a reference for Avatar. But most of all it was the Wachowskis who came and saw Mamoru Oshii’s movie, then conquered the world with The Matrix, which so obviously lifts from Ghost in the Shell that you can tick off the ideas as they … Read more
American Fiction
Can you be black in America and not live in the hood? What would the Great American Novel look like if it turned on the life and thoughts of a black man, rather than some old white dude like Philip Roth or Saul Bellow? American Fiction tackles those questions and a few more, in the process handing a great role to Jeffrey Wright, already one of the greats, but bolstered here by a fantastic cast who lift him to greater heights. Wright plays American college professor Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, whose career is put on hold after his latest burst of “inappropriate” behaviour with one of his snowflake students. This throws him back on … Read more
Bellissima aka Beautiful
If it’s a performance you want – and I mean a performance – look no further than Luchino Visconti’s 1951 comedy Bellissima (Beautiful to English speakers), in which Anna Magnani turns on the acting flamethrower in the film’s opening moments and runs it at full intensity until fadeout. She plays the mother with aspirations that her little girl shouldn’t live the same impoverished, largely hopeless, male-dominated life that she’s had – Maddalena (Magnani) strains every sinew in her body to get her girl into the movies. A casting call goes out on the radio in the film’s opening moments and from here we follow Maddalena and seven-year-old Maria (Tina Apicella) as they prepare for … Read more
Close
Close by name and nature, this intense, tightly packed, intimate study of a friendship between two 13-year-old Belgian boys took the Grand Prix prize at Cannes, where they do like a bit of a wallow. Beautifully made and sensitively played, it starts out in one territory but ends in another. The focus is on Leo and Remi, two lads in their last summer before puberty, or possibly the first one since the hormones announced themselves – either way we’re right on a cusp of big changes. Their boyish closeness – families who know each other, sleepovers possibly since childhood, everything shared – is sketched out in opening scenes of bucolic intimacy by writer/director … Read more
Birth
Birth doesn’t quite sit with Jonathan Glazer’s other films. As I write (February 2024), his latest, The Zone of Interest, is attracting awards like an MRI scanner attracts spoons. As did Glazer’s debut, Sexy Beast, in 2000, and the film that followed Birth, 2013’s Under the Skin. As for Birth, it was booed at its premiere at the Venice Film Festival and its current rating on Rotten Tomatoes puts it around 40% “fresh”. Rotten, in other words. People probably need to take another look. First thing: it’s brilliantly made. Second thing: it’s brilliantly acted, with a great cast all rising to the challenge. Third thing: the plot. This is where it does come … Read more
All of Us Strangers
All of Us Strangers, Andrew Haigh’s first movie since the atypical Lean On Pete, sees him back in familiar Haigh territory – with a twist. “Familiar” means an intense, almost claustrophobic, relationship-focused drama, but the twist comes from the way Haigh tells his story. It’s a spooky, old-fashioned ghost story. Not, note, a haunted house story (though there is a haunted house in it). Nor is this a horror movie, though psychological horror lurks somewhere in the background. It’s a ghost story of MR James variety, a style of storytelling that’s having a bit of a moment in UK movies right now – see Joanna Hogg’s The Eternal Daughter for something on fairly … Read more
The Whisperers
As good a portrait of what it means to be old and lonely as any you’ll see, 1967’s The Whisperers is an atypical British movie for the Swinging mid-Sixties, almost a return to the kitchen-sinkers of the early part of the decade. Bryan Forbes, who wrote and directed and was a smart man, understands the risks of making this film at this time and so doubles down on the “grim up north” stereotype, starting his film with visuals strongly reminiscent of the TV show Coronation Street – back-to-back houses, empty streets, dogs in the alleys rather than people, chimney-tops and brick walls – before bringing his focus in on one elderly lady. He … Read more
