Reviews
It’s been nearly 40 years since Pixar got going in the, yes, garage of one of its founders, and in that time it’s gone from being cult item to monster indie to part of the Disney mega-stable. Inside Out 2 comes at an interesting point in its history. Pixar is now part of the cultural … Read more
The Last Voyage of the Demeter lifts a chapter from Bram Stoker’s Dracula and turns it into a standalone story. Ambitious enough. If you haven’t read it, it’s a dark, storm-tossed episode told through the captain’s log of the doomed vessel the Demeter, a cargo ship which sails from Varna in Bulgaria, laden with boxes … Read more
Well it’s an African Festen, isn’t it? I’m going to say immediately what most reviewers seem to get around to saying eventually. But On Becoming a Guinea Fowl is much more than just a dark drama about family secrets coming to light at a family gathering, so memorably wrangled in Thomas Vinterberg’s 1998 film. The … Read more
Mr Klein is a film about a mindset as much as a man or an event. The event is the Holocaust, the mindset is of a man called Mr Klein, played by Alain Delon, a French art dealer who, one day in 1942 in Nazi-occupied Paris, is tagged as being a Jew. But he isn’t … Read more
The Three Musketeers – Part II: Milady, for those who didn’t get enough musketeering with director Martin Bourboulon’s first trip out in a plumed hat, Part I: D’Artagnan. Shot back to back with the first movie, the sequel has all the strengths of the original, and all the flaws, but more so. It is static and … Read more
“One of the unsung masters of Hungarian cinema,” says the press blurb about Zoltán Huszárik, director of Szindbád. Full disclosure: I’d never heard of him before a review copy of the Blu-ray boxset fell onto my doormat. It contains Huszárik’s entire collected output, two films and a handful of shorts. Hungary is quite a source … Read more
If you’ve ever wondered where to start with Jean-Paul Belmondo but have no taste for the French New Wave, The Professional might be the film for you. Released in 1981, it’s a pacy, light-hearted action movie not unlike a 1970s Bond movie, though Belmondo is more Sean Connery than Roger Moore. Belmondo plays the French … Read more
It’s often forgotten how much genre output the French make, and how well they do it. This icy thriller in a Chabrolesque mould has two brilliant performances at its centre. On the one side we have Déborah François as Mélanie, a young girl from a poor family whose ambition to become a pianist is ruined … Read more
In many ways a bog-standard bible flick given a cursory wipeover with a humanist rag in the figure of Harvey Keitel – doing penance for Bad Lieutenant all those years ago – Fatima is just dramatic enough, lavish enough and well directed enough to escape the “it is what it is” label. But first a … Read more
After the exotic holiday atmosphere of the second film, Turks & Caicos, the Worricker trilogy concludes with Salting the Battlefield. Writer/director David Hare takes us back, literally, to where he began gradually, starting the action out in Europe, where former agents and lovers Johnny Worricker (Bill Nighy) and Margot Tyrell (Helena Bonham Carter) are on … Read more
There’s nothing wrong with Ghostbusters: Afterlife at all, apart from its strange reluctance to reference Ghostbusters, the 2016 reboot directed by Paul Feig. The one that exercised a lot of bedwetters with its “controversial” cast with a lot of women in it. It wasn’t very good, but not because it starred Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, … Read more
Lance Henriksen has built a career on genre movies in which he was required to do little more than turn up and be Lance Henriksen – a big growling badass. It’s great to see him doing some actual acting, which is what he’s called on to do in Falling, a movie written and directed by … Read more