Reviews
Very much a Trump-era movie, The Hunt is the story of a gang of the “elite” going on their annual “deplorables” hunt (spot the Hillary Clinton reference), with a ragtag bunch of gagged and tied rednecks as their quarry. Interesting concept. The idea is that the elite set the rednecks running and give them something … Read more
Like a few episodes of a gentle family sitcom bolted together and the joins sanded flat, All Happy Families is an Everybody Loves Raymond-style journey with a couple of issues thrown in to indicate grown-up-ness. It’s well acted, slightly sentimental, a little nostalgic for simpler times and is just the sort of vehicle you might … Read more
Updating Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist, as Twist does, is a bold move. Usually the lure of the dressing-up box and the chance to lay on the foggy London atmospherics prove irresistible. Film-makers tend to stick with its original Victorian setting. Looking through the many, many adaptations, Twisted stands out. It’s a 1996 update set in … Read more
The man at the centre of The Mauritanian, Mohamedou Ould Slahi, is a real person. Wikipedia spells his last name Salahi but its facts otherwise agree pretty closely with Kevin Macdonald’s film – picked up in Mauritania, extraordinary rendition to Guantanamo Bay, where he was held for years, suspected of being Al Qaeda’s chief recruiter. … Read more
Night and the City is often described as the best film noir out of the UK. It was made by an American director with a French sounding name, Jules Dassin, which is poetically appropriate at least since the US is the home of noir and it was the French who coined the term. The title … Read more
Ernst Lubitsch’s 1932 drama Broken Lullaby was originally called The Man I Killed, like the Maurice Rostand play it was based on (L’homme que j’ai tué). It turned out to be a title too hard-hitting for the box office and so it was decided to change it. To The Fifth Commandment. Until some bright spark … Read more
The opening credits of Rumours formally thank the leaders of the G7. Which must be some kind of joke, because none of them emerges reputationally intact from this very weird film. Though getting a precise bead on the type of humour in play is tricky. Is it political satire? Cultural satire? Surreal japery? Guy Maddin … Read more
Unfashionable and not particularly worried about it, Midwinter Break is a showcase for the acting talents of Lesley Manville and Ciarán Hinds, who play a long-married couple taking a city break in Amsterdam. She bought them both the trip for Christmas and if he’s being honest he probably didn’t want to go but is not … Read more
What happens when the constraints of civilisation are loosened? It’s the sort of question Michael Haneke asks in a series of films, Funny Games and Time of the Wolf most obviously. In Infinity Pool Brandon Cronenberg attacks the same subject, except from a typically Cronenbergian direction, but comes to more or less the same grim … Read more
So this is how it ended. The 2005 TV movie Walker, Texas Ranger: Trial by Fire was meant to be a reboot for Chuck Norris and co. Instead poor ratings turned it into a swansong for Norris’s most famous character, the taciturn tough-but-fair cop who over an eight-year run on TV (1993-2001) had always had … Read more
In the 2014 Thai film 1448 Love Among Us, both the “1448” and the “Us” of the title are significant, the former the section of the Thai penal code restricting marriage to heterosexual people and the latter an indicator that this film is very much a movie for domestic consumption. Even so, for drama lovers … Read more
Remember the tagline for True Lies, the Arnie Schwarzenegger actioner in which he plays a secret agent whose wife (Jamie Lee Curtis) is unaware of his job – “When he said I do, he never said what he did”? Pretty much the same thing is going in M:I3, with impossibly happy semi-retired agent Tom Cruise … Read more