Reviews
Quick show of hands, did anyone actually ask for Bill & Ted Face the Music? Thought not, though here it is, around 30 years on from Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure and their Bogus Journey, back with its original stars, Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter, a good comedy director at the helm (Dean Parisot of … Read more
People at a decisive moment of their lives is what Lorelei is about. Or, more specifically people who should be at a decisive moment of their lives but whose circumstances are so proscribed that they’re incapable of seeing an opportunity offered, even when one does come along. Wayland is fresh out of jail after 15 … Read more
Dazed and Confused is Richard Linklater’s 1993 film doing for 1976 what George Lucas’s American Graffiti (1973) did for 1962. That is, it looks back fondly at a group of teenagers on the cusp of adult life on their last day/night of high school, while also observing how long ago it now all was, and … Read more
A Soviet Brief Encounter of sorts, Three Poplars on Plyuschikha Street is the sort of film you don’t really imagine coming out of the USSR, if grand epics featuring the entire Red Army are what you are used to. It’s a small-scale but beautifully crafted romance and in its day it was hugely popular. That … Read more
For those days when you just want something entertaining – Boss Level, a new Joe Carnhan movie that gives us the familiar Carnahan formula, action plus buffoonery, delivered with a deadpan rictus by a new arrival in geri-action heroics – Frank Grillo. Grillo plays Roy Pulver, a guy who wakes up every day to the same … Read more
Gaia is a South African horror film. Unusual enough. An eco-horror, a survivalist horror, a myco-horror and a Freudian horror too. And somehow, in among all that, it even manages a bit of old-fashioned girl-in-a-T-shirt horror titillation, a demonstration of its limber ability to play to and against horror expectations. The supreme example of this … 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
Things change and things stay the same in Caught by the Tides, Jia Zhang-ke’s experimental movie inspired by the Covid pandemic. Locked down at home with nothing to do, Jia wondered if he could put something together using unused footage shot over the years – rehearsals for movies, location scouting, technical try-outs to see how … Read more
Using ice hockey as the prism through which to view Russia in the immediate post-Soviet era, that’s the USP of Red Penguins, a documentary made by Gabe Polsky, the son of Russian emigrés and a former hockey player himself, so he knows whereof he speaks. Polsky takes us back to the 1990s, after the fall … Read more
The Hidden Fortress is a film by Akira Kurosawa and just that fact alone – “a film by Akira Kurosawa” – is enough to get it bracketed as an arthouse movie. Which is entirely ridiculous if you watch it, because there’s nothing difficult or abstruse going on here, no philosophical musing, no challenging style experiments to … Read more
Lance Henriksen has built a career on genre movies in which he was required to do little more than turn up and be Lance Henriksen – a big growling badass. It’s great to see him doing some actual acting, which is what he’s called on to do in Falling, a movie written and directed by … Read more
There’s a lot that’s good about Foto Háber (aka Haber’s Photo Shop), a pithy Hungarian spy thriller from 1963, but it does have one obstacle to surmount. Of which more later. One of the best things is Zoltán Latinovits as the cool, calm spy infiltrating an espionage ring that steals state secrets. Or secrets, let’s … Read more