Reviews
It was reading about his highly anticipated 2020 film Ammonite that jolted me into the realisation that I’d never got around to seeing God’s Own Country, former actor Francis Lee’s 2017 debut as writer/director. It was on the must-watch list and then another load of must-watches came along and it got lost. Thanks to the … Read more
Brigitte Bardot turns 90 in 2024 so this is a good time to have a look at her first starring role, in The Lighthouse-Keeper’s Daughter. It wasn’t her first film. That was Le Trou Normand, which also came out in 1952. It isn’t really her first starring role either, since Bardot herself doesn’t appear until … Read more
Fifty years before a referendum determined that the UK wanted to leave the EU, the subject was tackled in this Avengers episode called A Sense of History. But Martin Woodhouse’s screenplay doesn’t call on Winston Churchill or the Second World War to help invoke British exceptionalism. He goes further back… to Robin Hood and Merry … Read more
Cheap, badly written and not very well directed, Dangerous Voyage (aka Terror Ship) is the classic British B movie, directed by Vernon Sewell, a journeyman who knocked out a lot of films like this. The actors gabble, the plot isn’t particularly convincing and psychologically it never quite adds up. But, if nothing else, Sewell has … Read more
The Outrun is the latest from director Nora Fingscheidt, whose edgy, urgent System Crasher opened doors in 2019 that she largely closed again with her follow-up, 2021’s The Unforgivable, which many critics indeed found unforgivable, even though it starred Sandra Bullock. She’s on the upswing again here, with the jumbled-up story of a young woman … Read more
“There was only a mountain, no road. A forest, a river, nothing else. Nothing there at all.” Oligarch Vladimir Potanin, a (former) investor in the Sochi Winter Olympics says with just a touch of residual pride about Sochi, a spa town on the Black Sea that is now home to the Winter Olympics. He got … Read more
London in all its 1960s Swinging glory is what Smashing Time offers, in what’s meant to be a satire on the time and the place but is more a jaunt around the zeitgeist’s tourist landmarks strapped to some weak songs and very feeble comedy. I kid you not, there is a banana skin gag. Rita … Read more
Relay is the sort of slick, well crafted thriller George Clooney used to turn up in. A grungier, slightly less glossy Steven Soderbergh-style thing, ish ish ish, with Riz Ahmed taking the Clooney gig as a rather old-school detective of sorts – the conflicted, damaged dude doing what he does because it helps keep him … Read more
Mixing it up is writer/director François Ozon’s way. Mon Crime (aka The Crime Is Mine) sees him back on the comedic territory of 8 Femmes, Potiche and In the House, leaving his more serious, more recent movies, like Peter von Kant (a remake of a fraught Fassbinder film), Summer of 85 (a veiled autobiography) and … Read more
My Thoughts Are Silent (Moyi dumky tykhi, in the original Ukrainian) is one of a small clutch of films about or featuring a sound recordist, sitting alongside the likes of Silence (from Ireland), Upstream Color (USA) and Berberian Sound Studio (UK). All are odd and left-field in different ways, with My Thoughts Are Silent the … Read more
The hero is not and cannot be the hero, this is the circle Donald Sutherland cannot quite square in Eye of the Needle, the film that got director Richard Marquand noticed by George Lucas, who gave him the Return of the Jedi gig after watching it. Being British and non-union undoubtedly helped Marquand a fair … Read more
There’s a crusading aspect to Late Shift, made explicit in an on-screen endnote about the shortage of nurses worldwide. Focus on a particular to create the universal is the idea, Petra Volpe’s film following a single nurse for a single night as she deals with patients in an understaffed Swiss hospital. The writer/director is lucky … Read more