Reviews
And so Wonder Woman 1984. Last time we saw Gal Gadot’s lasso-swinging Amazon she was helping to win the First World War, and now, nearly 70 years on, here she is again in the era of Armani suits and “greed is good” and in a year most closely associated with George Orwell. This is a … Read more
There’s a Marvel character called Ares, and a DC one, strangely enough. A Greek god also goes by the same name, as does the hero of Ares (Arès, originally), a dystopian French actioner mainly remarkable for how unremarkable it is. Reda Arèsilla (Ola Rapace), to give him his full name, lives in Paris in 2035, … Read more
Messy, but good-messy like real life, Didi is the coming-of-ager working most of the angles in an attempt not to do the “arcs” of this sort of thing, and mostly succeeding. The other thing it’s doing is successful too, maybe even more so – depicting that dewy moment in the early 2000s when social media … Read more
The title of EM Forster’s novel is parodied in Room Without a View, for reasons which never really became clear to me, but then on looking back over my notes to this episode I realised I could remember barely any of it. Some things I do remember, though, such as the bare bones of the … Read more
Settlers is a sci-fi film so far away from what people usually term sci-fi that it barely qualifies. In fact it opens looking like a western – big craggy mountains in a dusty landscape – and then plays out like a wildlife documentary. The sort of wildlife documentary where a new male lion arrives on … Read more
You might know the title Days of Wine and Roses from Ernest Dowson’s 1896 poem Vitae Summa Brevis – “They are not long, the days of wine and roses/Out of a misty dream/Our path emerges for a while, then closes/Within a dream”. Or you might know it from Johnny Mercer and Henry Mancini’s Oscar-winning theme song … Read more
It’s pronounced “maa.lay.gao”, a screen note informs us, before Superboys of Malegaon gets properly underway. And that’s the tone of the entire film – nothing left to chance, a narrative that is laid out with one logical piece following another, nothing fancy, nothing tricksy, just the age-old “let’s do the show right here” tale, of … Read more
Peter Strickland goes Greek Weird Wave with Flux Gourmet, a bizarre farce of sorts poking mild fun specifically at experimental theatre groups and more generally at artistic snobbery. The Sonic Catering Institute is an artistic foundation run out of a baronial mansion by Jan Stevens (Gwendoline Christie), an eccentric, persnickety, over-enunciating control freak who routinely … Read more
Two spooked brothers head out into the night with guns. In the woods they find a corpse. Half a corpse, in fact. They examine it closely and discuss in practical tones what might have cut a man in two. A jaguar, one of them suggests, possibly wishfully. Too clean, says the other. And on they … 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
Liam Neeson. A Very Particular Set of Skills. They’re back in The Commuter, in which everyone’s favourite geri-actioner gets physical… this time on a train. This is the fourth collaboration between Neeson and director Jaume Collet-Serra, after Unknown (Skills in Berlin), Non-Stop (Skills on a plane), Run All Night (Skills in New York) and now Skills … Read more
Alfred Hitchcock and Henri-Georges Clouzot spent the 1950s casting directorial glances of mutual admiration at each other. Les Espions (The Spies in English) is Clouzot’s most overt homage to one of Hitchcock’s amused thrillers… and he gets it completely wrong. A non-thrilling thriller crossed with a non-funny comedy is the result. Gérard Séty plays the … Read more