Reviews
Is there anything more life-sapping than listening to a druggie talking about drugs? Yes, a film about one, and it’s not less boring but more if it also offers a redemptive ta-daa. To Write Love on Her Arms is a film about one such, a young woman, played twixt K-Stewart sulk and ScarJo pout by Kat … Read more
For a long time it was thought that only a couple of episodes from series one of The Avengers had survived. And then Tunnel of Fear turned up in a “private film collection”, as the press release guardedly puts it, swelling the number of complete episodes from two to a mighty three out of a … Read more
The French writer/director Bertrand Tavernier died earlier this year (2021), like François Truffaut another of that band of movie critics who went on to prove that they could make great films as well as write about them. Captain Conan (Capitaine Conan) might not be the most shining example of Tavernier at his best, but it … Read more
Big acting is the offer in I Walk Alone, the first of many teamings for Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas, and the first directorial effort by Byron Haskin, up till this point an effects guy. Haskin delivers nuanced, psychologically attuned drama while Lancaster and Douglas go at it like fighting dogs. The whole thing is … Read more
Sex as war. Breasts as breastplates. 1984’s L’Année des Méduses translates literally as Year of the Medusas but is usually rendered more tamely and less aptly in English as Year of the Jellyfish. Director Christopher Frank (who also wrote the book) sets out his stall straight away. A shot of two cocktails in tall glasses … Read more
Five loosely interlinked dollops of gonzo storytelling is the offer in Survive Style 5+. They are all, to an extent, stories of surviving, and there are five of them, so that more or less explains the title. The + could be a reference to the second half of the movie, when things take a turn … Read more
So this is what “the most watched TV movie in US history” looks like – The Day After, a disaster-movie-style treatment of nuclear apocalypse from 1983. “Most watched” is one of those tags up for debate, obviously – watched on the day of transmission versus watched again and again, for example. Or watched in the olden … Read more
Remember when Disney princesses just lay about in glass cases waiting to be kissed? Raya and the Last Dragon gives us the latest iteration of the new style of Disney female, joining Mulan, Merida (from Brave) and Moana in a kick-butty world of smarts where any obvious interest in looking glasses or clothes is deeply … Read more
The cheap and cheerful Cannon Group were ready for the big time in the mid 1980s. Having made a decent amount of money out of various barrelscrapers – Death Wish sequels, Chuck Norris actioners and assorted Ninja movies – they decided to move upmarket. Lifeforce was the result, a big-budget (for them) sci-fi movie and … Read more
Winner of the annual “most arthouse-movie-title award” – About Dry Grasses (Kuru Otlar Üstüne)? That academic “About”. The fact that it’s in Turkish. Over three hours long. By a director whose name many non-Turks struggle to pronounce. Exotica ahoy! The award is just a joke, but the movie is by Nuri Bilge Ceylan (roughly pronounced … Read more
In 1994, 800,000-plus Tutsis were butchered by their Hutu neighbours while the West debated whether this was genocide or merely isolated “genocidal acts”– i.e. not serious enough to warrant intervention. A decade on and the conflict is beginning to arrive on cinema screens, and most of the attempts to turn a dark day in human … Read more
The inspiration for One of Them Days is the black cinema of the late 1990s, a period when actors like Taye Diggs and Gabrielle Union, Nia Long and Omar Epps were on early career highs. Though Dude Where’s My Car?, as white-sliced as it comes, might also be in the mix. That was a tale … Read more