Reviews
Mank is the story, well known to film nerds, of the writing of Citizen Kane, for many the greatest film ever made. More exactly it’s two stories, one about writer Herman Mankiewicz dishing the dirt on press baron William Randolph Hearst (his model for press baron Charles Foster Kane) and his paramour Marion Davies, the … Read more
It Be an Evil Moon does not declare itself immediately, but debut feature director Ben Etchells offers snacks to keep us going with a pre-credits sequence – a guy driving on a forest road at night finds something blocking the way. Gets out. Moves it. Gets back in the car. The audience at this point … Read more
Can you have a boyfriend if even the thought of kissing someone distresses you? Turtles All the Way Down is the film equivalent of a Billie Eilish song, a tale of teenage angst written by John Green, who also did The Fault in Our Stars. And, as the Amazon algorithm puts it, if you liked … Read more
Fashion photographer and music-video director David LaChapelle’s documentary about Krumping, the brutally physical, adrenalised street dance movement in South Central LA which rose, in the aftermath of the 1992’s Rodney King riots, from the Clowning movement. Yes, clowning as in painting the face and putting on big baggy clothes. Think rap face-to-face showdowns, but instead … Read more
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 … Read more
So here’s the most expensive film ever made in the USSR, or a quarter of it. War and Peace Part I finally arrived in 1966 after years in the making, a rebuke to the massive 1956 US version starring Audrey Hepburn and Henry Fonda. Here’s how you do Tolstoy, the Soviets are saying, at five … Read more
So here’s The Count of Monte-Cristo 2024 style, not to be confused with the TV show of the same name from the same year covering the same story. Or the more than 20 film adaptations down the years, the numerous TV and radio versions (including one by Orson Welles). Plays. Musicals. Games. You get the … Read more
The Last Stop in Yuma County is a reminder of the sort of film there used to be a lot of in the late 1990s. In that first post-Tarantino wave, low-budget film-makers would head to the desert, find a diner somewhere, load it up with gonzos and dimwits, add guns and fruity dialogue and then … Read more
Rom-coms are all about the journey and not the destination, so they say. If that’s true, then mark My Bollywood Bride down as a trip in an overheated vehicle, with terrible scenery outside and fellow passengers you’d kill yourself to be away from. The boy-meets-girl plot sees Sex and the City’s Jason Lewis as a … Read more
100 Nights of Hero re-invents the One Thousand and One Nights, aka The Arabian Nights, aka the story of Scheherazade, making sex and gender dynamics more explicit even than they were in the original stories and packaging everything up like a gift of Turkish delight wrapped in gossamer, drenched in perfume, and then swaddled in … Read more
The “who’s zooming who” thriller of the 1990s rides again in 2018’s Bad Times at the El Royale, one of those epics where, by the end, almost everyone is dead and a building is in flames yet barely a spark of emotion has been generated. That is probably the intention. Instead writer/director Drew Goddard wants … Read more
The 2012 Greatest Films of All Time poll, conducted every decade by Sight and Sound magazine, has Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror at number 19. On the Critics’ Poll, at any rate. The poll of directors places it even higher, at number 9. So directors like it more than critics, who like it more than the general … Read more