Latest Posts
Girls Like Girls
A coming-of-ager set in 2006. Which means what? iPods and computers with big chunky displays. AOL Messenger. And Zach Braff! All are here in Girls Like Girls, Hayley Kiyoko’s feature debut, which was a song, a music video and a book before it became a film. Work that IP. Though not in it much, Braff embodies that time almost like no one else – he’d been in the wispy, troubled-dude dramedy Garden State in 2004 and was midway through his run on Scrubs. He’s really just a flavour bomb this time around, here to remind us what it was all like back then. The focus is actually on teenager Coley (Maya da Costa), … Read more
Kiss of Death
Fans of Richard Widmark who can’t get enough of his giggling psychopath routine, Kiss of Death is for you. This is where it all started, in 1947, a crime drama notable not only for being Widmark’s screen debut but also for delivering a really good performance by Victor Mature. Having grown up in a household where Mature’s presence on the small screen was usually greeted by titters, I personally wasn’t quite ready for this. But good he really is. He plays Nick Bianco, a smalltime crook who gets caught doing a jewellery heist but refuses to name his accomplices when taken in by the police. All this changes some way down the road … Read more
Blue Heron
Blue Heron is largely the story of its maker, Sophy Romvari, or of her young life, as seen from a couple of decades on. How much of it is true? There’s a disclaimer up front about memory and its unreliability, so possibly not all of it. And in any case Romvari takes a couple of conceptual leaps towards the end of her debut feature that lift it into a different realm altogether – two different realms, in fact. But for the most part this is the story of a family of six from Hungary who arrive in 1990s Canada and set about assimilating – they try to speak only in English at home, … Read more
Holiday
Screwball but not particularly comedy, in spite of Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn’s presence, Holiday is too serious a business to be unserious about, and there aren’t really any jokes in it. But Grant bashes through it as if it were in the key of fun, and he drags everyone and everything along in his wake. He even throws in a backflip or two here in there, to remind us he got his start in showbiz as a tumbler. Grant plays Johnny Case, a normal, everyday guy who’s worked his way up to a decent job in finance. Johnny has met and fallen for Julia Seton (Doris Nolan), unaware that she’s from a … Read more
Lee Cronin’s The Mummy
I was initially suspicious of Lee Cronin’s The Mummy – does anyone care who Lee Cronin is, or his Mummy, and why should this film bear his name? It turns out there’s a good reason for the director’s name up top – no one involved wanted audiences thinking they were getting a continuation of either the Brendan Fraser-era The Mummy (1999), or the 2017 one, which was frankly rather a bizarre cinematic use of Tom Cruise and Russell Crowe, but there you go. Those were in different ways action movies and this is most assuredly horror. Cronin you may know from Evil Dead Rise, which was an efficiently horrible kind of shocker with … Read more
The Pied Piper of Hamelin
I don’t remember there being an immigration angle to The Pied Piper of Hamelin, at least in the story I heard as a child, but it’s clearly there in this otherwise very traditional version of the fairy tale from 1957. The plot otherwise remains as I recall it. The town of Hamelin is plagued by rats so the townspeople offer a passing piper, who claims he can charm them all away with his music, a huge reward for doing so, then refuse to pay him after he’s done his job. Whereupon he performs the same trick on the town’s children, whisking them off to some some cliff face, which opens as he approaches. … Read more
The Drama
Is it possible to reject the big idea but still like the movie? Exhibit A: The Drama, a producers’ wet dream of casting – Robert Pattinson and Zendaya – and a strange hybrid of the talky New York dramedy, of the sort Woody Allen made his own, and a horror film. Woody Allen done as horror, yes, that’s about it. They are uneasy companions, one all rational, the other fantastical, one a running commentary on a situation, the other a situation that needs no commentary. But even Woody Allen veers off piste occasionally – Midnight in Paris – to great effect. Ari Aster and Lars Knudsen, the guys behind Midsommar, are behind this, … Read more
The Monkey’s Paw
When William Jacobs wrote the short story The Monkey’s Paw in 1902, could he have realised what sort of afterlife it would have? It’s been adapted dozens of times, even more if you count productions that don’t use its original title. This 1948 version is a short and atmospheric rendition of Jacobs’s story, changing the names and some of the details but keeping the central idea intact – a monkey’s paw that will grant three wishes to anyone who is holding it, but which brings a belt of bad luck along with the granting of the wish. For a film that’s only just over an hour long, you might marvel at how much … Read more
Power Ballad
By the end of Power Ballad I felt like I had been emotionally manipulated all the way up a very familiar garden path. In case I’m giving the wrong impression, I also cried. On balance I’d summarise it as “John Carney does it again”, the writer/director who does other things but regularly returns to the street-musical genre that made his name with 2006’s Once (wow, 20 years ago), and then proved he wasn’t a one-trick pony with Begin Again, Sing Street and Flora and Son. Do we all like Paul Rudd? Is Rudd the everyman du jour, more handsome, funnier and nicer than we are but adjacent enough that we buy in to … Read more
Il Posto
Clear-eyed but compassionate, Il Posto is the other film by Ermanno Olmi, the one that isn’t The Tree of Wooden Clogs. Both are neo-realist to an extent and are concerned, obsessed, with the stuff of everyday life. Here, though, the focus is on the city, whereas Clogs was resolutely a tale of rural peasant life. It translates as The Job, Il Posto, and follows a young lad from the fringes of Milan, away from his traditional family and into the realm of the modern company. First he takes an aptitude test, where he’s inculcated into the world of time and motion, aptitude, the peg being created to fit the slot, rather than vice … Read more
Romería
The intimate, highly personal family drama shot in an unobtrusive, semi-documentary way is Spanish auteur Carla Simón’s speciality, and in Romería, her latest film, she stays true to her vocation. Born in the mid-1980s, Simón was orphaned at an early age and raised by an uncle. In the early 2000’s she set off on a quest to find out more about her father’s family. The story here is pretty similar – Marina (Llúcia Garcia) arrives in Vigo in the early years of the 21st century, to chase down the paperwork she needs to get her into university to study film but also to dig out information about her parents. They fell in love … Read more
The Second Twin
Who killed Oliver Lacat (Jean-Claude Rolland)? The Second Twin is a strange film that manages to fold suspect, investigator and lawyer all into one person, Pierre Montaud (Robert Hossein). Meanwhile, director Christian-Jaque’s 1966 whodunit serves up distinctive visuals as it plays with suspects, as if this were an expressionist film from the 1930s, but in searingly vivid colour. Why it’s called The Second Twin I don’t know. The original French title is La Seconde Vérité, which translates as The Second Truth, something the alternate English title, The Other Truth, gets nearer to. Is there a second twin? I don’t remember seeing one, or even a suggestion of one, but then cards are being … Read more
