Reviews
Gentle gothic. If there is such a thing then Couture might be it. A slice down through the fashion industry, it’s also, maybe, Alice Winocour’s riposte to Robert Altman’s Pret à Porter – serious, ground-level drama not airy, star-filled satire. That said, no less than Angelina Jolie is in it. She plays a commercials director … Read more
Somewhere near the end of this highly anticipated children’s adventure movie there’s a cameo by Dustin Hoffman. He just blurs on, says a couple of indistinct phrases and is not seen again. The pointlessness of his appearance is indicative of what’s wrong with this film, a series of disconnected and poorly motivated events which no … Read more
By general consent a classic, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre also won three Oscars – best director and screenplay for John Huston and best supporting actor for Walter Huston (his father) – and is one of those films that also get film-makers dewy eyed. Stanley Kubrick named it one of his faves (in 1963 … Read more
Robert Sigl was about 25 when he started making Laurin (aka Laurin: A Journey into Death), his remarkably atmospheric feature debut. It did well at the festivals when it came out in 1989, and Sigl picked up a rake of awards. More personal movies should have followed. But since the distinctive 1994 TV mini-series Stella … Read more
The Shrouds looks like the filmic equivalent of David Bowie’s final album, Dark Star, a requiem revisiting old ideas in an up-to-the-minute way. David Cronenberg has not announced that he is dying. But aren’t we all? All the time? It’s the sort of thing Cronenberg has been saying, with a macabre chuckle, since he first … Read more
At the Raindance film festival, London, UK, 27 October–6 November 2021 The UK voted to leave the EU in 2016. Power, Profit and Populism: The Battle for Hard Brexit tells the story of how the answer to a seemingly straightforwardly worded referendum question was hijacked by invisible forces. “Should the United Kingdom remain a member … Read more
Hard Truths must be Mike Leigh’s most straightforwardly enjoyable movie since Topsy Turvy. Which is probably all kinds of wrong, since it’s about a woman in the grip of a depression so profound and persistent that she’s almost learned how to live with it. Leigh likes these pithy titles – High Hopes, Life Is Sweet, Naked … Read more
On the principle that second-rate Soderbergh is better than no Soderbergh at all, a warm hello to No Sudden Move, a pastiche 1950s crime drama with a Maguffin that insists it’s more than a Maguffin. Don Cheadle, Kieran Culkin and Benicio Del Toro play three prickly guys hired to “babysit” a family (ie hold them … Read more
“Who the fuck are you?” two cops ask the bloody guy they’ve got sitting over the table from them, in some sort of interview situation. “I’m, er…” he says. And boom, up on the screen comes the single word in giant letters, NOBODY, and this head-clearing mix of extreme violence and dry comedy gets underway. … Read more
“All children, except one, grow up.” The opening line to JM Barrie’s Peter Pan is already plenty creepy (especially those commas). Ripe for exploitation even. Now that the copyright has expired on the book, in the USA at any rate, someone has gone ahead and mined the children’s classic it for its horror potential. Peter … Read more
The Coffee Table (La mesita del comedor in the original Spanish) is a gonzo bad taste very black comedy that’s sat down and wracked its brains as to what could be the very worst situation that could befall a couple with a new baby, and then gone there, stayed there and started sending posts back … Read more
First-world and real-world problems collide in Human Capital, which started life as an American novel, became an Italian movie (Il capitale umano) in 2013 and then returned to the US in 2019 for this English-language version. How best to describe all three? Bonfire of the Vanities meets The Ice Storm will about do it. In … Read more