Popular Reviews
X-Men
The origin story of the Marvel Comics characters which, as in the original print version, struggles with the sheer number of characters. It’s a SFX-heavy titanium-shelled blockbuster that pits one team of mutants (headed by good guy Patrick Stewart) against another (bad guy Ian McKellen). Guy being the operative word – X-Men isn’t too bothered with the sexism of its source material. Take that name for starters. Men? X-Persons, surely. The men in the comic, as in this adaptation are all gutsy and have traditional masculine attributes: Professor Xavier (Stewart) has brains; Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) is a hairy brute; Cyclops (James Marsden) has nuclear-level laser sight; and as for naughty Sabretooth and Toad … Read more
On the Silver Globe
Ready for one of the strangest sci-fi movies ever made? On the Silver Globe (Na srebrnym globie in the original Polish) is as powerful as it is incomprehensible, as if David Lynch’s Dune had been put in a bag and tossed around with Game of Thrones, Tolkien, Tarkovsky and Mad Max. The story behind it is interesting too. It was mostly shot in 1976 by the brilliant Polish director Andrzej Zulawski, but production was closed down by the Communist censor, who feared the film was wandering into off-limits territory. The sets and costumes were destroyed, and so were all prints of the film. Or so the authorities thought. In fact Zulawski managed to … Read more
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest
Yo ho ho and a bottle of something very rum, this second instalment of Gore Verbinski’s money-spinner is a swirling follow-on from part one and a dizzying lead into part three – it’s all midsection in other words. Tonally, it’s Monty Python’s Life of Blackbeard, but with one big difference. It’s not funny. The question is: is it supposed to be? The actors don’t seem to know, so they all camp it up just to be on the safe side. Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow continues channelling Keith Richards and actually getting Donatella Versace. Orlando Bloom leaps about trying to look like the film is about him. And Keira Knightley looks fiercely gorgeous, … Read more
Wizards
A 1977 movie featuring Mark Hamill about the cosmic struggle between the forces of good and evil? Wizards is of course the answer, maverick animator Ralph Bakshi’s freak-flavoured adventure, which only incidentally features Hamill, though he makes for a useful gobbet of trivia if you’re a quiz compiler. Actually, the parallels with Star Wars are more than incidental in this one, since it really is a good v evil, tech v magic (and what was the Force, if not magic?) showdown waged between family rivals in a world far, far away – in time at least. Wizards is set on a post-apocalyptic Earth that’s still, millions of years in the future, recovering from … Read more
Pinocchio
To the question: Is there a canonical Pinocchio I can enjoy in movie form, the answer is “Yes, this one by Matteo Garrone”. It takes Carlo Collodi’s story back to its origins – it’s about a lump of magic wood being carved into a talking puppet by poor woodcarver Gepetto, and then the puppet setting out on a string of adventures all the while wishing he could make the next fantastical leap and become a real boy. There is no shortage of competition, from a 1911 silent version, through the Disney’s 1940 version to countless others, like the 1957 one starring Mickey Rooney or the 2002 one directed by and starring Roberto Benigni, … Read more
The Adults
The Adults will resonate with anyone who’s ever left home – to go to college, take a job, whatever – flown the parental nest, and then started returning periodically on visits that are more duty than pleasure. Eric, played by Michael Cera at a level of diffidence that’s very Michael Cera, is the guy back in town and trying to duck obligations to old friends and family by playing one off against the other. He’d love to come and see the new baby of one set of friends but he’s seeing his sisters that night. To the sisters he hands out the same bullshit excuse but flipped – he’s seeing the baby so … Read more
The Lair of the White Worm
The Lair of the White Worm is a good place to start if you’ve ever wondered what happened to Ken Russell. Once upon a time he was a good film-maker who made fascinating, elegant dramas. Then the success of Women in Love turned his head and from that point on, almost without exception, his subject matter – rock music (Tommy), classical music (Lisztomania), DH Lawrence (The Rainbow) – mostly came second to Ken’s “vision”, a frotter’s orgy of corny erotica. The Boy Friend somehow escaped the Russell treatment, and in Altered States Russell was held in check by a studio mightier than Ken’s own ego. But give Russell his head, and look out. … Read more
The Exchange
Director Dan Mazer edges further into the mainstream with The Exchange, an update on all those Michael Cera/Jon Heder-flavoured films from about 15/20 years ago – the geek shall inherit the earth. Tim (Ed Oxenbould) is the Canadian nerd and self-styled teen intellectual with a love of films with subtitles, existentialist novels by Camus etc, who signs on to take part in a French exchange program. What he’s hoping for is someone “sophisticated, smart and worldly”… because French. What he gets is Stéphane (Avan Jogia), a jockish guy in bleach-look jeans who wants to talk about sex all the time. Tim wears glasses, is despised for his pretensions by his classmates and can’t … Read more
The Last Man on Earth
Four years before George Romero is supposed to have revived the genre, the zombies are already alive and kicking (well, shuffling) in 1964 in The Last Man on Earth, a lurid yet oddly static example of a genre movie with all the signs of something knocked out with little respect for its audience. Unsurprisingly it got little respect back in return. It does have a few things in its favour, though. Vincent Price as the titular last human, and a story by Richard Matheson which would be repurposed a number of times, most famously as The Omega Man, starring Charlton Heston, and I Am Legend, with Will Smith. There’s a legend surrounding the … Read more
The Disciple
If you want it enough you can have it. Believe. Be passionate. Follow your dream. Movies are often insistent on this point. The Disciple begs to differ. You wouldn’t guess from his face, but Sharad (Aditya Modak) has it all. He plays raags, as this Mahrathi-language film calls them, ragas, most likely, if you’re an English speaker. His guru (Aran Dravid) is highly respected, deeply knowledgeable, kindly and technically supremely skilled. And as we can see in The Disciple’s opening scene, he also has talent. In flashback to Sharad’s childhood we see a supporting, nurturing home life, with a loving mother. And if Sharad’s passionate, inspiring father is a touch cajoling in his … Read more
Till Death
Till Death isn’t much of a film for irony but the title, recalling the “till death us do part” line from the wedding vows, is rich in it. Megan Fox plays the straying wife whose husband decides to take an exquisite form of revenge, one which winds up with her shackled to a dead corpse in a remote holiday home that’s been cleaned of every utensil, tool or scrap of anything that might serve as a key. There’s no parting here. And that’s the setup – Emma (Fox) in her ivory silk underwear and covered in blood and bits of the dead man’s brain, with no working phone line, her mobile phone dunked … 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
