Reviews
Every year the arthouse-friendly movie portal Cineuropa hands out a rake of Best Of awards. At first glance Mutzenbacher looks like an odd inclusion on its list, sitting alongside Aftersun, The Quiet Girl (my favourite), Godland, Piggy, Rimini and Eo. They are all fabulous, but they’re fabulous fictional dramas. Mutzenbacher is a documentary. And yet … Read more
Allen Baron. You’ve probably never heard of him. But he willed into being 1961’s Blast of Silence, a remarkable late noir – or early neo-noir, depending on which end of the telescope you’re looking through – which he wrote, directed and also took the leading role in when his original star, buddy Peter Falk, bailed … Read more
If ringing the changes is the big challenge of genre cinema, Sirât pulls it off brilliantly. Occasionally the workings of writer/director Óliver Laxe’s mind are visible – how can I catch the audience off guard? Mostly they’re not. And that’s probably down to the people and the places – both unusual. It’s two genres in one, … Read more
Letty Lynton tells the story of Madeleine Smith, who wanted to move on from a lover who didn’t want to move on from her. And so she killed him. The same story was also told in David Lean’s Madeleine in 1950 (good too) and in Dishonored Lady, starring Hedy Lamarr in 1947 (not seen it). … Read more
The Zone of Interest is a film set in the house that’s right next door to Auschwitz, so it has a mountain to climb. Which is this – against the brute fact of exterminating people en masse, pictorial representation of the same is always going to look a bit kitsch. Jonathan Glazer, who directs and … Read more
Would you have guessed, when Russell Crowe was appearing in Australian TV soaps like Young Doctors and Neighbours that one day he’d be playing the lead in Nuremberg? And that he’d have gone from being a slim, handsome chap with tousled hair to someone who could effortlessly play Hermann Göring, sour-faced, fat and oozing self-regard. … Read more
Brian Cox apparently gets a bit sick of being asked in interviews about Succession and playing Logan Roy, which might explain his presence in The Parenting, a film unafraid to do jokes about projectile vomiting alongside a whole slew (spew?) of gags revived from the era of gross-out comedy. Look, this says, I’m an actor, … Read more
Welcome back, Jennifer Lawrence, who as recently as 2015/16 was the world’s highest paid actress and in Causeway reminds us why. And perhaps needed to – so many films she’s appeared in since her high-water mark have been just a touch underwhelming. And welcome to the big time for Brian Tyree Henry. Oscar-nominated for his … 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
A strange and evocative film, Undergods is a portmanteau fantasy horror with the seams sanded flat and then caulked in an attempt to hide the joins. Even so, it falls into clearly discernible distinct chunks, which seemingly bear little relation to each other. First up, K and Z, a pair of post-apocalyptic dealers in humans, … Read more
Also known as Lies and Alibis, this is one of those “who’s zooming who” comic thrillers – a bit of Tarantino dialogue, some swish Soderbergh camerawork, a twisty LA Confidential-ish plot. And Steve Coogan’s in it too. Yes, that does seem like a slightly odd casting decision – a Brit actor best known in the UK … Read more
The world may not need yet another version of The Secret Garden, but here’s one anyway. The latest adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s children’s story is in a crowded field and to cut through has to compete with two very respectable adaptations, the much lauded one from 1993 directed by Agnieszka Holland and the one … Read more