Reviews
Did you know that Billy Wilder had a brother and that his name was Billy too? In fact W Lee Wilder had more of a claim on “Billy” than Billy did, being two years older than his more famous sibling and having actually been baptised William. Billy’s birth name was Samuel. W Lee Wilder also … Read more
Written by John Le Carré, a master spy storyteller, and featuring a masterspy, George Smiley, you’d expect A Murder of Quality to be, well, a story about spying. In fact it’s a bare-bones whodunit with not a spook to be seen. Both Le Carré and Smiley are here essentially moonlighting. The grisly murder of a … Read more
Telling the story of the hyperhyped tennis match between 55-year-old “male chauvinist pig” Bobby Riggs and the then reigning queen of tennis, Billie Jean King, this deceptively light documentary catches the casual and systemic sexism of the time, paints a warm, human picture of King and even has the grace to give the publicity hungry … Read more
After sublime revenge thriller Revanche, Austrian writer/director Götz Spielmann falls back to earth with Oktober November, a soap, a melodrama, call it what you will, but whether you like it or not, it’s a film with a chrome-like finish. It hangs off the spectacular cheekbones of its star, Nora Waldstätten, an ice-maiden specialist giving us … Read more
Is Rush – about the rivalry between 1970s Formula 1 drivers Niki Lauda and James Hunt – Ron Howard’s best film yet? After those terrible Da Vinci Code films recently, made for who knows what favour to the studio, this might not seem like much of a claim. But let’s not forget that Howard made Apollo … Read more
A strangely old-fashioned supernatural comedy from Aziz Ansari, still probably best known for Parks and Recreation, who wrote, directed and stars in Good Fortune, a so-nearly-great feature debut falling over itself in its desire to pack everything in. The opening shot of Keanu Reeves stood on top of a monumental building kitted out in angel’s … Read more
Kimberly (Evan Rachel Wood) is a spiteful young wannabe actress and fulltime minx who accuses her teacher (Ron Livingston) of sexual harassment… partly for fun, partly to get some acting practice in, mostly for spite. And before you know it there’s a TV news crew camped out on the door, with an overeager reporter (Jane … Read more
Barbara Loden only made one feature film and Wanda is it. A remarkable piece of determinedly non-Hollywood vérité, it features no hero, comes with no moralistic teachable points and hasn’t got much of a plot, unless a relentless slide towards the abyss counts as one. Loden was inspired to make it after reading a newspaper … Read more
The formidably talented maverick Leos Carax hasn’t made a feature in nine years, nothing since 2012’s batshit Holy Motors, so that’s one thing to thank the new movie Annette for. Whether Annette actually is a Carax movie at all is the question though. How so, you ask. Because Annette is written by Ron (he of … Read more
“In a world at war many sparrows must fall.” A poignant line slightly out of keeping with the hard-boiled characters populating this atypical noir. Unusually on the money politically and psychologically, The Fallen Sparrow is a story about a volunteer fighter in the Spanish Civil War who returns to New York only to find it … Read more
The standard submarine drama – depth charges, beep-beep sonar, bursting bulkheads, “secure that hatch” dialogue – gets an efficient workthrough by director Jonathan Mostow, who did a lot with very little in 1997’s “who stole my wife” thriller Breakdown. He’s got a good cast here too – Matthew McConaughey putting in one of his brattish … Read more
There aren’t that many films called The Gangster, which is odd considering how many gangster movies there are. But here he is, this singular malefactor, in a film noir from 1947, a strange one with a weird, distorting-mirror quality. Too arty for its own good seems to have been the general consensus at the time. … Read more
