Reviews
Makoto Shinkai is one of the “other guys” of Japanese animation – he’s not Hayao Miyazaki, in other words – and if it does nothing else, his movie Suzume demonstrates the vast amount of influence the director of Howl’s Moving Castle, Kiki’s Delivery Service, My Neighbour Totoro and Spirited Away still wields in that country, … Read more
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
A duvet-day rom-com in the Four Weddings mould but with a pair of lesbians doing the canoodling. As seems to be de rigueur these days, the plucky Brit babe is played by an American. And Piper Perabo makes a decent stab at an English accent, playing the newlywed falling for the girl (Lena Headey) who … Read more
In The Card Counter we meet another of Paul Schrader’s lost loners, with Oscar Isaac joining actors as varied as Robert De Niro (Taxi Driver) and Lindsay Lohan (The Canyons) as the latest in a series of souls seeking salvation, redemption, expiation in a do-or-die struggle with their own human frailty. In familiar Schrader first-person … Read more
Paris Qui Dort, Paris Asleep, The Crazy Ray, The Invisible Ray and even At 3:25, this odd French silent movie from 1925 goes by many names and was the first feature by René Clair, a film-maker who got into movies because that’s where the girls were, or so he said, and stayed there because that’s … Read more
Arthouse discovers the rigours of genre in Reflection in a Dead Diamond (Reflet dans un diamant mort), a vogue-ing pastiche of Bond movies with a bit of Death in Venice. If you like the work of Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, who have been doing this sort of thing for over 20 years, in films … Read more
1970s neo-noir doesn’t begin and end with Chinatown and The Long Goodbye. Here, for instance, is The Outfit, director John Flynn’s lean adaptation of one of the 24 novels Donald Westlake wrote under his Richard Stark pseudonym. Many Stark stories feature the no-nonsense career criminal Parker and in a mini-festival of Parker adaptations, The Outfit … Read more
How to describe Abigail without ruining it? It starts out looking very much like a heist thriller, except it’s not money the gang in question is trying to lift, but a young girl called Abigail, the daughter of a very rich man, we later learn, who is expected to pay out $50 million to get … Read more
On the face of it Law of Tehran is a very simple movie. It’s the story of a cop trying to find a drugs kingpin and what happens when he does. But as well as being a crime thriller, Saeed Roustayi’s second movie also manages to be a nuanced psychological drama, a survey of the … Read more
The films of Robert Eggers can get a bit overwrought and Nosferatu is no exception. Both The Northman and The Lighthouse (The Witch not so much) overdid it. All well and good if you subscribe to the view that too much gothic is still not enough. And you’ll be doubly re-assured by Eggers’s decision to … Read more
Delicately ambiguous as a title, Loving Highsmith also turns out to be a clever way of signalling the approach of its director, Eva Vitija, to its subject matter. It is both fan letter to the writer of classics such as Strangers on a Train (she really loves her Highsmith), and an attempt to delve into … Read more
Charles Crichton directs and Christopher Lee guest-stars in The Interrogators, so we’re expecting good things of this episode of The Avengers, right? The plot is a good one – writer Richard Harris fleshing out an idea by Brian Clemens – and hinges on army chaps being tested to destruction by an interrogation outfit run by … Read more