Reviews
Drive-Away Dolls is the first feature film that Ethan Coen has directed without brother Joel’s involvement at some stage. Playing it safe, he’s decided to go for a homage to the films he first made with Joel back in those Blood Simple/Raising Arizona years. While this isn’t a bad thing in itself, it does mean … Read more
Threaded with religious sentiment like a 1970s Martin Scorsese or Abel Ferrara movie, 1948’s Cry of the City stars Richard Conte and Victor Mature as two Italian-Americans who knew each other as kids. Now grown up they’ve wound up on opposite sides of the law – Martin Rome (Conte) is a criminal languishing in a prison … Read more
Robert Sigl was about 25 when he started making Laurin (aka Laurin: A Journey into Death), his remarkably atmospheric feature debut. It did well at the festivals when it came out in 1989, and Sigl picked up a rake of awards. More personal movies should have followed. But since the distinctive 1994 TV mini-series Stella … Read more
Zombies of the Third Reich lives in a critic-proof zone along with all the other Nazi Zombie movies. How do you approach something that’s designed to be ridiculous? A collision of genres, a mixed chow mein of excess, these movies come from the land that taste forgot. And that’s exactly as it should be. Good … Read more
Three young women are chased around an island by three crazed ex-soldier guys in Katie Aselton’s boo-goes-there horror story which would slot nicely into the big book of feminist films if it weren’t for the gratuitous (oh come on) nudity. Not that there’s anything wrong with god-given nakedness. But back to the film. Directed by … Read more
Boring but prescient is how you’d describe You’ll Catch Your Death, fourth episode of the final series of The Avengers. Prescient because it’s all about biological warfare, people dying due to exposure to some deadly toxin, Steed and King investigating the demises of the dead men (naturally) who all happened to be ear, nose and … Read more
One of those pre-Code 1930s comedies that comes wrapped in an aura, Design for Living can’t live up to the sell. It’s not funny, though there is the odd smirk, nor perceptive, unless a comedy about the fickleness of women is what you’re after The aura comes virtue of the boys in the backroom. Noel … Read more
It’s soap, it’s melodrama, have a go if you like, but if it’s absolutely nothing else, Marcel Carné’s 1938 hit Hôtel du Nord is an object lesson in how to use a hair light. Watch it for its looks rather than its plot, in other words, which slaloms about a touch preposterously, though its actors … Read more
Feeling, looking, sounding like a very dark John Hughes film (Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller period), The Spectacular Now also has in Miles Teller and Shailene Woodley exactly the sort of actors Hughes might have cast – not the prettiest, but the most personable, the most “relatable” as we now say. It’s Teller’s first starring role, after … Read more
The dramatised story of Beatrix Potter, creator of children’s character such as Peter Rabbit and Jemima Puddle-Duck, with Renee Zellweger as the Edwardian miss who’s 32 years old and still not married. It’s about a woman struggling against the odds, against familial indifference, social expectation and industry hostility to get her books into print. … Read more
Just as the keel of the series had started to lift, floating at last in its own water, episode nine of series two plonks it back on the sea floor. The Sell-Out is a throwback to series one, which itself harks even further back – to the film noir genre which originally originally inspired the … Read more
The Merry Widow. In the 21st century the title creaks and the concepts of merriness and widowhood seem strangely out of step with modern life. And yet, 100 years ago The Merry Widow was quite the thing. The huge success of Franz Lehar’s 1905 operetta is what prompted film versions, which popped up regularly in … Read more
