Latest Posts
The Cameraman
For Buster Keaton, it all went right and it all went wrong in 1928 and The Cameraman is where it all collides. Widely considered to be one of his masterpieces, the film marks the point where Keaton loses control of his own narrative. He’d gone from writer, star and director on a string of hits, like Sherlock Jr, Go West and The General, produced by his own company. But here he suddenly was, working as a gun for hire for MGM, who did their best (at first, at least) to keep him on a tight leash. It’s also the last of Keaton’s silent films and, ultimately, the beginning of the end for him … Read more
Exit 8
A man on the Tokyo subway struggles to find the exit. That’s the entire plot of Exit 8, proof that it’s not what you do it’s the way that you do it. This is a tense and atmospheric chunk of quasi-scifi, owing something if not everything to Jean-Paul Sartre’s Huis Clos, with a bit of a stylistic assist from Vincenzo Natali’s cult classic Cube. Quite how Natali got sidetracked into gun-for-hire work on TV shows rather than making more superb high-concept movies like Cube is a question for another day. Here the incredibly capable director is Genki Kawamura, whose only previous feature, A Hundred Flowers, was a tremulous tale of encroaching dementia. Here, … Read more
Gentlemen of Fortune
You might not associate frivolous caper comedy with the dour Soviet Union of gulags and five-year plans, but that’s what Gentlemen of Fortune is. A larky affair that probably works best if you get all the cultural specifics, it’s perfectly entertaining even with very little knowledge of the USSR. It’s one of the most successful comedies ever produced under the communist system – doesn’t that tickle your curiosity? It’s a very familiar story, of one man posing as another, kicking off with the theft from an archaeological dig of a solid gold helmet reputed to have belonged to Alexander the Great. The thieves are soon caught and sentenced to prison, but where’s the … Read more
Rebuilding
In plain language Rebuilding doesn’t sound like much of a proposition. A guy whose farm has been burnt out by a devastating fire tries to put his life back together while taking shelter in a Federal Emergency Management Agency trailer. That’s it. But give it a bit of space, as director/writer Max Walker-Silverman gives his characters space, and it rewards the interest. It’s a warm and lovely film at many levels, but a psychologically nuanced one too. The fire is a metaphor. When we first meet Rusty (Josh O’Connor) he’s selling off what’s left of his cattle and pitching up at the FEMA camp for people whose farms and homes have been destroyed. … Read more
100 Years of… A Page of Madness
Madness indeed. A Page of Madness was made in 1926 on next to no budget, by a talented director aided by a group of demented avant-garde writers called the Shinkankakuha, who were determined to break free from the shackles of naturalism. For many years it was considered lost, until its director, Teinosuke Kinugasa, found a copy of the film in a storeroom in 1971. Still with a third of its footage missing, that’s the version you will see today. The other thing that needs saying before locking in is that it’s made with barely any gear. Kinugasa and co had no equipment to speak of, just a 16mm camera and eight lights. Remember … Read more
Gabby’s Dollhouse: The Movie
If you’re over the age of eight, Gabby’s Dollhouse: The Movie is probably not something you’ll have come across, or the Netflix show it sprang from. Its star, Laila Lockhart Kraner, probably won’t mean much to you either. Your loss? This intensely likeable, positive, bright and sunny excitement isn’t a “something for everybody” offer. But if you’re in the right demographic – the producers go as low as pre-schoolers and that seems about right – who knows? As is traditional for shows given a movie breakout, the writers send the format on holiday. So Gabby heads off with her Grandma Gigi to Cat Francisco, in Gigi’s VW Camper Van – number plate KTTY WGN – where … Read more
Twisted Nerve
“A twisted nerve, a ganglion gone awry, predestines the sinner or the saint.” Twisted Nerve gets its title from a poem by George Sylvester Viereck – a German migrant who did time in a USA jail for being a Nazi spy – and worries away at that “predestines” bit for nearly two hours. What is it that makes this film’s protagonist, Martin, so weird? Was he born that way or is he just maladjusted? Nature or nurture? It’s Hywel Bennett as Martin, for a while in the late 1960s and early 1970s the go-to man for weirdos, his cherubic features, hipster aspect and big eyes suiting him to roles like this, a dissolute … Read more
Red Right Hand
We’re in Appalachia for Red Right Hand, latest film by the Nelms brothers, Eshom and Ian. And immediately having said Appalachia, the shades start to assemble. Poor lives on the margin. Cackling inbreeds. Illicit drugs. Attack dogs. Tattoos. Guns and hunting. God. The family. Male relationships that seem overly familiar. Check, check, check, check and check (plus a few more). No one seems overly intent on overturning the stereotypes in Orlando Bloom’s latest foray into action-hero territory. This he has been exploring, presumably since he and his agent sat around scratching their heads over what to do with his career – Lord of the Rings must have been lucrative but that was a … Read more
The Night Porter
Problematical movies Exhibit A – The Night Porter. The story of a former guard at a concentration camp who meets up with an erstwhile prisoner some years later and starts a sexual relationship with her. Roger Ebert thought it “nasty”, Pauline Kael considered it “offensive” while Vincent Canby of the New York Times went for “a piece of junk”. Kael also described it as “veneered with redeeming social values”. Is it though? Even that is up for debate. The director Liliana Cavani based the film, so she said, on a conversation she had with a woman who’d been in one of the death camps and had fallen for a member of the SS. … Read more
Vesper
Ambitious sci-fi from Lithuania – but in English, before you switch off – Vesper is all about the world-building and the genre-tasting. One minute a coming-of-ager, another a love story, yet another a quest movie, its overriding vibe is the eco-apocalyptic thriller, set in a doomy world after the collapse of civilisation, where humans fight each other and an aggressive ecology for supremacy. Vesper Chronicles, the on-screen title actually proclaims, as if this were going to be the first of a series of movies. There is a Young Adult, almost Hunger Games aspect in its focus on a rugged young woman as its central figure. Vesper (Raffiella Chapman) lives out in a blasted … Read more
Monte Carlo
Jolly and bright and unfashionable in so many ways – which just makes it better – Monte Carlo is also an Ernst Lubitsch film and so bubbles along like a thing demented. It has entirely uncool stars like Jack Buchanan and Jeanette MacDonald in the leads and a storyline taking repeated runs at the mistaken identity idea. MacDonald later became known for the films she made with Nelson Eddy, and is all the better without him here, as a flappy, silly, delightful countess who runs away on her wedding day from the oafish daddy’s-boy duke she’s meant to be marrying. In opening scenes that are textbook “Lubitsch touch” stuff and could come from a … Read more
Before the Fall
A baroque apocalypse thriller and, in case it’s getting too existential for you, Before the Fall (originally Tres Diás) also adds a dab of serial-killer angst for good measure. This feature debut by director F Javier Gutiérrez made a big splash when it came out in 2008 and then quietly disappeared. Arriving three years before Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia, it seems at first to ask the same question: how would you react to the news of an impending apocalypse? Alejandro (Victor Clavijo), living with his mother, is a disgruntled handyman who learns one day via TV bulletin that the world will end in three days. A gigantic meteor will eradicate any possibility of … Read more
