Popular Reviews
Shanghai Express
A train heads from Peking to Shanghai and a woman from disgrace to redemption in 1932’s Shanghai Express, the fourth collaboration between director Josef von Sternberg and star Marlene Dietrich. Another transformation is evident, of Dietrich, from the plubby Mädchen in The Blue Angel two years before to the star who’s all cheekbones and chiselled angles. This is the film that gave us the iconic image of Dietrich toplit and eyes imploringly turned heavenward. DP Lee Garmes got the credit for it and won an Oscar for this film’s spectacular lighting but Von Sternberg did almost all of it, according to Dietrich’s biography anyway. Strangely, it doesn’t look like her film at all … Read more
The Patience Stone
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 19 August Afghanistan independence, 1919 On this day in 1919, King Amanullah Khan declared Afghanistan a sovereign and independent country. His country had been at war with the British since May of 1919, in what is now called the Third Anglo-Afghan War. Until it started, the British had been attempting to keep Afghanistan out of the Russian military sphere by paying the Afghans huge amount of money. However, the Afghans had been taking money from the Russians too, playing one side off against the other. The First World War had changed everything. For one thing it had made Afghanistan realise that … Read more
Hangmen Also Die!
The screamer hanging off the end of Hangmen Also Die! kind of says it all. As if “hangmen” and “die” in the same sentence weren’t enough, the title of Fritz Lang’s 1943 film adds extra emphasis, just in case we hadn’t got it. The scrolling opening prologue continues in much the same vein, informing us that the “thousand year flaming tradition” burning in the hearts of the people of Czechoslovakia was in danger of being extinguished by the Nazis. Czechoslovakia was in fact about 25 years old at the time, having been cobbled together at the end of the First World War (it is now two separate countries again). This insistence is all … Read more
What War May Bring
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 31 December President Truman declares the Second World War over, 1946 On this day in 1946, the US President declared that hostilities had come to an end in the Second World War. Whether this means that the war itself ended on that day depends on your terms. The war in Europe ended on VE day (8 May 1945). Some suggest that the war ended with the defeat of Japan and the signing of an armistice, with VJ day (14 August 1945). Still others reckon the war can’t be termed over until the signing of the peace treaty with Japan (1951). And … Read more
The Ear
When director Karel Kachnya was making The Ear (aka Ucho), released in 1970 but not seen until 1990, he must have known it wasn’t going to be seen. Surely? How could he not? We’re in Communist Czechoslovakia, where a married couple are coming home from a Party party. Anna (Jiřina Bohdalová) is drunk and bursting for a piss, Ludvik (Radoslav Brzobohatý) is tired and anxious. Has it been a good evening? Has he said the right thing to the right people? Was the party they were at another leg up in his reasonably glittering career or something else? Ludvik isn’t sure. And now, it seems, they can’t find the keys to the front … Read more
Our Friend
I’m not sure who the audience for terminal disease weepies is. Not me, for sure. But Our Friend is a remarkably good one. When we die, or as we die, the highs and lows of the life just lived end up being tallied. That’s what this film does, taking particular account of one high that would have passed unnoticed if something really bad hadn’t come along. The high is Jason Segel as the titular Friend, the something really bad is the cancer diagnosis that Nicole (Dakota Johnson) receives. The action actually snakes back and forth through 14 years of the relationship between Nicole and her husband Matt (Casey Affleck) but it’s the diagnosis … Read more
The Avengers: Series 2, Episode 13 – Death Dispatch
John Steed and Cathy Gale’s party trick, a duet working variations on the theme of the invincibility of the British upper class, really comes into its own in Death Dispatch, the 13th broadcast episode of series two. We’re off in the sort of colonial landscape described by Graham Greene – of swarthy thugs, Freudian dictators and minor functionaries of the Empire, a place where life is cheap and death is pitiless, as we see in the opening shots of this story where a low-level envoy newly in from Washington is quickly despatched in his hotel room in Jamaica. Cut to Steed, ogling women from his Caribbean sun lounger and meeting his control, One-Ten … Read more
When Evil Lurks
Two spooked brothers head out into the night with guns. In the woods they find a corpse. Half a corpse, in fact. They examine it closely and discuss in practical tones what might have cut a man in two. A jaguar, one of them suggests, possibly wishfully. Too clean, says the other. And on they press, to a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, where it turns out that the bisected man had an appointment to kill Uriel, a pus-filled human being grown vast on cankers and sores. Pedro (Ezequiel Rodríguez) and his brother Jimi (Demián Salomón) know exactly what this means. The brilliant thing about the Argentinian horror movie When Evil Lurks … Read more
Fast X
The word “family” is uttered 56 times in Fast X, number ten (there’s a clue in the title somewhere) in the series whose focus on interpersonal relations threatens to scupper it. And yet it keeps on going. The latest outing is not so fast, not so furious, maybe, but in a jimjams-and-pizza-and-beer kind of way, it’s a decent enough piece of entertainment – 1950s-melodrama acting with obsessively planned Buster Keaton-style stunts. There is a plot, there really is, of a disavowed, Mission: Impossible flavour, with Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) and gang being accused of some dreadful atrocity and then being pursued by the Agency it used to work for. The atrocity – a bouncing … Read more
Bacurau
Two opinions of Bacurau from Amazon’s Top Reviews of this film. “One of the worst movies we have ever seen,” said Scout in a one star thumbs-down. “We were both regretful that we paid to give away time that we cannot get back watching a movie that was this painfully stupid.” On the other hand Cameron Brady, giving Bacurau five stars, said, “This movie is simply fantastic. It touches on subjects of socioeconomic disparity, racism, colorism, etc. but keeps a certain humor and charming weirdness as well.” I can sympathise with both points of view. If what you want is a good strong story told in an efficient way, Bacurau is a load … Read more
My Name Is Sara
My Name Is Sara also goes by the title The Occupation – two separate titles for one film setting out to tell two distinct stories. There’s another bit of splittage going on as well. It’s a film shot in Poland with a Polish cast and crew but everyone in it speaks in English, regardless of how well they can actually do that. Into the story, which is a true one, of a Jewish girl called Sara Guralnik escaping with her brother from a Polish ghetto in 1942 and then trying to make it through the rest of the war while hiding out inside the borders of neighbouring Ukraine – there are the Nazis, … Read more
The Final Girls
Meta-slasher horror, the last refuge of the scoundrel – discuss. If you can’t make a decent straight-up slasher movie, why not put a frame around it and serve it up with an ironic wink, right? Prejudices laid out on the table, The Final Girls actually turns out to be a decent meta-slasher horror movie, with no scoundrels in sight, a good cast, sharp, smart direction and a high concept powerful enough to get it through a tight 90 minutes of jokes, shrieks, gruesomeness and a complete lack of bare breasts. You can’t have everything. Its premise: here in the early decades of the 21st century (the movie’s from 2015 so probably about there), … Read more
