Reviews
Bedtime Story is one of a string of movies produced by Marlon Brando’s Pennebaker Productions, a company run by Brando’s father, Marlon Sr, and named after his mother, Dorothy Pennebaker. They didn’t all feature Brando Jr. 1961’s Paris Blues was a vehicle for Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Sidney Poitier and Louis Armstrong. 1959’s Shake Hands … Read more
Is the 1984 flop The Little Drummer Girl really a spy thriller, as it says on the tin, or an existential drama about a woman losing her mind because she believed in nothing to start with? Diane Keaton stars in this adaptation of a semi-successful John Le Carré novel (attempts have been made to re-appraise … Read more
After new opening titles – a mix of the medieval (Steed’s swordplay with his brolly) and the modern (Tara King in sophisticated black evening dress and then action-girl attire) – we’re off into Game, the first proper Tara King era episode of The Avengers. The excellent Robert Fuest (director of The Abominable Dr Phibes) is … Read more
If the characters from Dr Strangelove somehow escaped and eventually found themselves in a Tarantino movie, it might look like One Battle After Another. A 1970s-vibing, magpie-thieving, funny and relentlessly entertaining ride, director Paul Thomas Anderson’s movie is basically one gloriously extended chase with added spiritual input from Hitchcock, the Coens and Paul Greengrass (plus … Read more
We’re so used to the phrase Pixar Movie that it’s often easy to forget that they are in fact directed by actual human beings, not rendering algorithms. Soul is co-directed by Pete Docter and Kemp Powers, says the imdb, but the end credits of the film itself tell us that it’s “Directed by Pete Docter” … Read more
Kelly Reichardt’s films often operate at two levels. At the surface one story plays out, while somewhere to one side, and often as a comment on the first story, something different is going on. First Cow could really be called First Love, since it’s the story of two men who meet in difficult circumstances and … Read more
What’s the best Fritz Lang film? The argument could go on all night, and there are so many to choose from – contenders include M, Fury, You Only Live Once, The Woman in the Window, or While the City Sleeps. Or how about Rancho Notorious, Metropolis, The Big Heat or Man Hunt? So how about … Read more
“I’m gonna go home and wank over your Instagram pictures, but not the ones with your mouth open,” Pete says to Mandy early on in Rare Beasts, Billie Piper’s patchily brilliant excursion into the ongoing joust that is male/female relations. Mandy (Piper, who also wrote and directs) has “big teeth”, big cartoon features generally, something … Read more
Five horny college kids head off to an idyllic island for a weekend of booze and death in this tiredly formulaic horror film which subjects the isolated 20somethings to violent interaction with dogs – German shepherds, to be precise. To spend more time on the plot than is strictly necessary, it seems that someone has genetically … Read more
At the Raindance film festival, London, UK, 27 October–6 November 2021 French-Canadian film-maker Philippe Grégoire’s debut feature The Noise of Engines (Le bruit des moteurs) starts off with various shots of cars donutting away in rubber-burning circles, going nowhere, but fast. It’s a metaphor, of sorts, for a story about a young man who seems … Read more
Though there’s plenty of people who take drugs for entirely recreational purposes and never go to hell in any sort of handcart, there’s not much drama to be had from making movies about them. So instead drugs movies tend to be about people hitting the buffers. Candy does at least do it with a roster of … Read more
When director Karel Kachyňa was making The Ear (aka Ucho), released in 1970 but not seen until 1990, he must have known it wasn’t going to be seen. Surely? How could he not? We’re in Communist Czechoslovakia, where a married couple are coming home from a Party party. Anna (Jiřina Bohdalová) is drunk and bursting … Read more