Reviews
Too fast and furious, maybe, Johnnie To’s 1993 superhero actioner The Heroic Trio nevertheless has energy and style to spare, and as much of that strange Hong Kong martial-arts weirdness – all leaping and spinning but no contact – as you could want. The plot gets kind of lost in the excess but it’s about … Read more
Mogul Mowgli jumps into debates about authenticity and cultural appropriation – often conducted by people with no skin in the game on behalf of people who do – and does a decent job of trying to make itself heard above the din of the culture war. It does it by focusing on the particular rather … Read more
Fritz Lang’s scorching run of the late silent era continues with Frau im Mond. Translated variously as Woman in the Moon, Girl in the Moon and By Rocket to the Moon, it’s Lang’s second go at sci-fi. He’d made Metropolis only two years before, nearly bankrupting the Ufa studio in the process. And yet, for … Read more
The six-part TV series Private Schulz was a hit when it first aired and has become something of a cult since it was first broadcast in 1981. Made by the BBC in collaboration with the Australian ABC, it was the last outing for the great TV writer Jack Pulman, whose I, Claudius adaptation had been … Read more
After two documentaries in 2010 and 2018 that did the same, Cassandro tells the story of Saúl Armendaríz, a lucha libre fighter in Mexico in the 1980s, and his transition from being one of masked luchadores to being an altogether rarer creature, an exótico. As a gay man on the macho lucha libre circuit, Saúl … Read more
The creeping feeling that The Avengers is running out of puff is further reinforced by The Joker, a rewrite of the Cathy Gale-era episode Don’t Look Behind You. Except in this case it’s Emma Peel who is stalked by an admirer with a deadly agenda. It was a very good episode first time round and … Read more
“One of the forgotten masterpieces of the Hollywood Left.” Slavoj Žižek’s verdict on They Live demonstrates that even philosophers have off days. Whether Žižek had been smoking genetically re-engineered skunk or not, one thing about John Carpenter’s 1988 film is indisputable: if you want an allegory for the notion of false consciousness, you’ve found your … Read more
An intelligent and acidic if somewhat stagey comedy about a film production descending on a small New England town and the effect that each has on the other. It’s written and directed by David Mamet, not known for out and out comedy, but clearly feeling flighty at the moment, flighty enough to turn out the … Read more
Old Guy should be a good film but isn’t. Thanks to someone somewhere along the line deciding to funny things up. Not that the funny doesn’t have its moments. Take the opening scene, of an old guy with a big floppy grey moustache at a rave full of young people. Smiling ecstatically and throwing shapes, … Read more
It’s easy to see The Holdovers as Alexander Payne’s riposte to all the moaning that Martin Scorsese and a few other members of the old guard were doing not so long ago about the predominance of superhero movies and how, you know, they don’t make ’em like they used to etc etc. Payne has gone … Read more
Midway between Philip Marlowe and John Wick, Walker, the hero of 1967’s Point Blank is a stylish hero in a film so stylish and influential that its original impact can now only be guessed at, so relentlessly has it been plundered in the ensuing decades. Soderbergh is a fan, as is Tarantino, and so, of … Read more