Reviews
“Librement inspiré de faits réels,” it says at the beginning of Eiffel. Not a mere “inspired by real events”, often used as an apology for serving up historical fact laced with made-up stuff, but “freely inspired”. Turn to Wikipedia if what you want is the actual factual, in other words. That’s what I did, and … Read more
Fans of plotless movies will love The Appointment, an increasingly cultish British horror from 1982. The only feature by Lindsey C Vickers, it was regularly described as lost until the British Film Institute got themselves together and released it as part of their Flipside series of under-appreciated left-fielders. As to plot, it’s the title. There … Read more
A shipwrecked robot adopts an orphaned gosling and learns to be a mother in The Wild Robot, a perky and poignant animation produced by DreamWorks and directed by Chris Sanders of How to Train Your Dragon fame. The bumf says Miyazaki and old Disney informed the look of the finished product, but the DreamWorks hit … Read more
The Zone of Interest is a film set in the house that’s right next door to Auschwitz, so it has a mountain to climb. Which is this – against the brute fact of exterminating people en masse, pictorial representation of the same is always going to look a bit kitsch. Jonathan Glazer, who directs and … Read more
Penetration Angst – a good, eye-catching title for a no-budget black comedy made in 2003 but mainlining the vibe of the 1980s video nasty. It was called just plain old Angst in the USA, which is their loss. It’s the strange and convoluted story of a girl called Helen (Fiona Horsey) who, as well as … Read more
Fantômas: L’échafaud magique (aka Fantomas: The Magic Scaffold) is the first of four feature-length adaptations made in the 1980s for French TV. No less than Claude Chabrol directed this first one, with Juan Luis Buñuel (son of Luis) picking up numbers two and three, before Chabrol returned to round the series off. If you know … Read more
In The Platform (El Hoyo, in the original Spanish) a man wakes up in a place that isn’t familiar, a place full of dread and fear located in a world that seems to operate by different rules. He may not know where he is, but we know where we are: in one of those high … Read more
One of the breakout hits of world cinema – a term that didn’t yet exist – Pather Panchali came seemingly from nowhere in 1955 and swept all before it. It remains a highly regarded film to this day, still featuring on Sight and Sound’s prestigious once-a-decade 100 Greatest Films of All Time list. In other … Read more
A quick look at the list of ingredients and the people involved would probably be enough to convince most people that 1959’s Our Man in Havana was going to be a cracker – but it isn’t. It’s a cake full of good things that isn’t, in itself, a good cake. Pity. The promising components include … Read more
Martin Scorsese’s remake of the brilliant 2002 Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs adds 50 minutes of flab to what was a lean, taut thriller. The plot is the same – cop bosses Martin Sheen and Mark Wahlberg send in undercover man Leo DiCaprio to bust a gang. Unbeknown to the boys at the precinct, gang … Read more
Silent Dust first aired on New Year’s Eve 1965 and from a 21st-century vantage point has all the makings of a very prescient episode of The Avengers. In what starts out as an obvious parody of a nature documentary, we first observe birds nesting in the trees, then watch as the birds start dropping off … Read more
Two Brits starring in a French film. In Her Hands (Au bout des doigts in French) didn’t get a theatrical release in the UK or the US, so if the strategy was to guarantee anglosphere box-office action by casting Lambert Wilson and Kristin Scott Thomas (both of whom speak fluent French), it clearly hasn’t worked. … Read more