Reviews
“How did you write it? How did you write Wuthering Heights?” Charlotte Brontë asks her sister Emily as Emily lies on her deathbed. Emily is the answer, a feverish blend of fact and fancy, part biography, part romantic extravaganza. It’s tasteful but not twee, gothic but not ridiculously so. Pulling off the impressive feat of … Read more
With Ridley Scott’s Napoleon thundering over the horizon on horseback, time to haul out a movie Scott and his star Joaquin Phoenix have clearly feasted on, 1927’s historic and historical behemoth, Napoleon, aka Napoléon vu par Abel Gance (ie “as seen by Abel Gance”). Adored by Coppola, derided by Kubrick, who thought it “really terrible” … Read more
Tales of Ordinary Madness is a snappier title than the book it’s based on. Charles Bukowski’s Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions, and General Tales of Ordinary Madness is the source of Marco Ferreri’s semi-doomed attempt to get the beat poet for guys (always guys) too young for Kerouac et al onto the screen. It doesn’t work and … Read more
Epic: Elvis Presley in Concert. A marketing award to whichever genius came up with that title for this epic rebrand of old product done with such polish and dash that it casts Elvis Presley anew – all over again. Baz Luhrmann is credited as the director but here he’s more an editor. Having come across tons … Read more
A froth of noir, romance and melodrama aerated using Rita Hayworth as a whisk, Gilda exploits the star’s status as the number-one pinup girl for American troops fighting overseas during the Second World War. It’s the Rita Hayworth movie, not just in the eyes of posterity but according to its own estimation of itself. “Starring … Read more
The Batman. Let’s get the plot out of the way first, since it’s the most straightforward aspect of the latest bulletin from Gotham City. A caped crusader, a trio of villains in the shape of Paul Dano’s Riddler, Colin Farrell’s Penguin and John Turturro’s Carmine Falcone, a campaign of murder being waged against city officials. … Read more
Can you believe there are still people out there who don’t know that all-conquering smash musical Wicked is the origin story of the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz. I know this because I met one of them just the other night. Relief: he did know what The Wizard of Oz … Read more
The Marvels, the shortest movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe so far, is also the least successful in terms of box office. It didn’t even recoup its production costs on its theatrical run. I wonder if posterity might be kinder to it than fickle cinema audiences, because whatever you think of the 33rd movie in … Read more
Tommaso is a film by Abel Ferrara that’s essentially a film about Abel Ferrara, with Willem Dafoe in the lead role as an avatar of the writer/director, a creative dude trying to live out his golden years in Italy but finding old demons constantly resurfacing. It’s an uncomfortable and not entirely gripping drama, though Dafoe’s … Read more
Mixing it up is writer/director François Ozon’s way. Mon Crime (aka The Crime Is Mine) sees him back on the comedic territory of 8 Femmes, Potiche and In the House, leaving his more serious, more recent movies, like Peter von Kant (a remake of a fraught Fassbinder film), Summer of 85 (a veiled autobiography) and … Read more
There’s a crusading aspect to Late Shift, made explicit in an on-screen endnote about the shortage of nurses worldwide. Focus on a particular to create the universal is the idea, Petra Volpe’s film following a single nurse for a single night as she deals with patients in an understaffed Swiss hospital. The writer/director is lucky … Read more
Aardman, the animation house that gave us Wallace and Gromit, announced the ending of their collaboration with DreamWorks (Shrek) just as Flushed Away was released. And watching it, you can understand why. High on sentimentality and laden with backstory, it’s a DreamWorks movie with Aardman touches, rather than what Aardman probably hoped for – an … Read more
