Popular Reviews
Family Plot
If you were idly flicking through the TV channels on a wet afternoon and hit upon Family Plot, chances are you wouldn’t immediately think it was a Hitchcock movie – it looks more like an episode of Columbo. That bright TV lighting, those mid-range actors who look like they’re trying not to be fingered as this week’s criminal, one who’s once again not as smart as the man in the mac. I’ve looked up Bruce Dern, Karen Black, Barbara Harris and William Devane and not one of them ever did make an appearance on Columbo but they don’t quite fit the standard Hitchcock bill either, or not the bill containing Cary Grant, Grace Kelly, … Read more
1 September 2014-09-01
Out in the UK This Week The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (Sony, cert 12, Blu-ray/DVD/digital) Marc Webb’s reboot of Spider-Man in 2012 was artistically unnecessary but Webb did at least inject a welcome note of young love into it – he directed indie weepie 500 Days of Summer, let’s not forget. This even more unnecessary sequel sees Andrew Garfield’s Catcher in the Rye webslinger taking on an unnecessary plurality of villains – Electro and Green Goblin. Electro is a nice bit of racist stereotyping for Jamie Foxx, who starts off as a mild mannered janitor and winds up as “angry nigger” Electro, all exaggerated features and steroidal rage, capable of bringing a city to its knees … Read more
Burnt Offerings
1976’s Burnt Offerings can’t really bear the analysis often heaped on it. Regularly described as either a weighty commentary on materialism or as a metaphorical analysis of the dissolution of the American family, it’s much better seen as a mood piece with not that much to say but an awful lot to give if you give yourself up to it. There is an American family in it, though, and it does get put through its paces after Ben Rolf (Oliver Reed), wife Marian (Karen Black), son David (Lee Montgomery) and Ben’s aunt Elizabeth (Bette Davis) take on a vast, palatial house for the summer at a rent that is at the low end … Read more
23 September 2013-09-23
Out in the UK This Week Byzantium (StudioCanal/cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) Ah, the burden of being a vampire. It’s been done to death in the movies recently but Neil Jordan is at the helm here and knows how to spice things up. Here he adds a touch of the same mix he used on The Company of Wolves nearly 30 years ago. In other words there’s added social critique, class and gender being the targets of both Jordan and writer Moira Buffini. Saoirse Ronan and Gemma Arterton are the two vampires searching for a new home, the former a Let the Right One In waif, the latter a lusty Hammer horror vamp – both of … Read more
Colossus: The Forbin Project
Often overlooked when it comes to discussion about dystopian sci-fi of the 1970s, Colossus: The Forbin Project looks a lot more chillingly prescient now than it did back when it was released in 1970, when it was seen as a sub-Strangelove addition to the genre of jokey sci-fi. It’s the story of the computer that takes over the world, enslaving all of humanity with it. And it starts with Dr Forbin, a boffin who has come up with the design for Colossus, a supercomputer that will assume control of the defence of the United States, and with it “the free world”. What Forbin, his team and the acutely involved US President don’t realise … Read more
Speak No Evil
Another film that’s hard to like but easy to admire, Speak No Evil comes hot on the heels of a recent example of the same – Soft & Quiet – which I watched last week. Both set up and stoke a tension that becomes so janglingly unpleasant that, for this home viewer, pausing, getting out of the chair and walking around a bit became a necessity. I suspect the way to really watch this film is in a cinema, where there is more pressure to stay in your seat and not out yourself as such an obvious wuss. Again like Soft & Quiet, Speak No Evil starts out in the sunlit uplands of … Read more
How I Ended This Summer
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 7 May Vladimir Putin becomes Russian president, 2000 On this day in 2000, former KGB lieutenant Vladimir Putin was elected President of Russia. He had resigned from the KGB on the second day of the attempted KGB coup against Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in August 1991 – “I immediately decided which side I was on” he later said. From there he went into an administrative career working for the Saint Petersburg mayor’s office, where he was responsible for organising foreign investment. In 1996 he moved to Moscow, where he became responsible for transferring the former assets of the Soviet Union to … Read more
Saltburn
The music in Saltburn tells you a lot of what you need to know about the movie. Starting with Zadok the Priest and ending with Sophie Ellis Bextor singing Murder on the Dancefloor, this is a big, gaudy, fun switchback that surely would have been made in Technicolor if the process was still about. A superheated noirish romp is what you get either way. The plot is simple but it plays with expectations about who exactly is zooming who. Poor little rich boy Felix (Jacob Elordi) befriends poor little poor boy Oliver (Barry Keoghan) at Oxford University, where Felix is a student as if by right and scholarship boy Oliver is there on … Read more
Popeye the Slayer Man
Let’s hear it for Popeye the Slayer Man, a title so brilliant and obvious you might wonder why it’s never been used before. The reason is quite simple: Popeye fell out of copyright in 2025 and so the intellectual property became easy pickings. Hot on the case, two movies have already appeared this year (I’m writing this in March 2025 so there could yet be more). Popeye’s Revenge got there first, in February, followed by this. Both are slasher horrors. What’s going on there then? I’ll admit that I watched this partly out of badness, prompted by my brother, who asked me if I’d seen it and then warned me not to “go … Read more
Code Blue
Code Blue is the second of six (as of June 2023) features by Poland-born, Netherlands-based film-maker Urszula Antoniak, and the second one I’ve seen. The first one I saw, Magic Mountains, was made in 2020, nine years after Code Blue but both feature single women locked in near-mortal struggles, with intimacy an issue. Does that make this a feature of her work or a coincidence? Three’s a trend, as they say, so I don’t know. Either way, Antoniak is someone to watch. She has a way with space and sound, and on the evidence of the work I’ve seen, makes stylish films bristling with menacing moods and atmospheres of psychological imperilment. There is … Read more
Earwig
A girl is having her saliva harvested in the opening scene of Earwig. There’s a contraption fitted to her head which consists of a metal frame, some ducting and a pair of little glass vials. An attentive man is is on hand to help collect the secretion, which is then transferred to a mould and frozen. Hey presto, a set of dentures made of frozen spit, which are then carefully fitted into the mouth of the girl, who has no teeth of her own. Not a word has been spoken and in fact nothing will be said until, at 25 minutes in, after several repeats of the procedure (teeth made of ice…er… melt) in … Read more
The Drover’s Wife
Leah Russell stars, writes, directs, produces and plunders her own family history for The Drover’s Wife (aka The Drover’s Wife: The Legend of Molly Johnson), a fine-looking revisionist western set in the Australian Outback. Russell plays Molly, it almost goes without saying to say, a woman left to fend for herself and her kids out in the back of beyond while her husband is away droving sheep up in the high country. Handy with a gun but with a tendency to shoot when the red mists descend, Molly may be suffering from a form of PTSD, as no one back then ever called it. It’s writer/director Russell’s first fictional feature (she’s done some … Read more
