Reviews
The 2012 Greatest Films of All Time poll, conducted every decade by Sight and Sound magazine, has Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror at number 19. On the Critics’ Poll, at any rate. The poll of directors places it even higher, at number 9. So directors like it more than critics, who like it more than the general … Read more
Cry Macho is the latest instalment in the Clint Eastwood series of movies you could loosely call the “old guy’s last hurrah”. Like Gran Torino and The Mule, it’s a moment to be reminded of past glories as well as be entertained, all the while marvelling at at Eastwood’s remarkable career and long life. Clint … Read more
When Jenny Slate and Dean Fleischer Camp first started work on the short Marcel the Shell with Shoes On they were an item. By the time this feature-length fourth iteration of Marcel’s adventures arrived on the screens in 2021 they were not. Why the film has themes of break-up, heartbreak and the power of relationships … Read more
As witty and ingenious as the best of its predecessors, Final Destination: Bloodlines revives the old franchise after a 14-year hiatus, number six in the series keeping faith with an idea originating in a script for The X-Files that was killed off before making it to the screen. Which is appropriate, since the Final Destination … Read more
Supposedly the last western Sergio Leone worked on, 1975’s A Genius, Two Partners and a Dupe (aka Un genio, due compari, un pollo) has a ramshackle spaghetti western charm and an opening section which strongly recalls the beginning of Once Upon a Time in the West – it’s operatic, dramatic, largely silent and at the … Read more
What is it Tarantino says, about all movies being interesting even if they’re not all good? I Eat Your Skin is a case in point. Not great but absolutely fascinating, it started life in 1964, when it went by the title Zombies, gaining the name it’s now stuck with when a distributor was looking for … Read more
In a developed world of plunging birth rates, here’s Elio, a Pixar animation for sad only children. An ET-flavoured tale flipped on its head and with Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in the mix, it also doffs its hat to the era of Big Science, when the likes of Professor Carl Sagan were … Read more
Of the three “loner” films that Paul Schrader wrote, Light Sleeper gets the least love. Taxi Driver is always number one, of course, and American Gigolo is often mentioned in despatches. But ask people if they’ve seen Schrader’s 1992 drama and the answer is often an open mouth and a tilted head. It’s a pity … Read more
The Greek Weird Wave was at its height in 2011 when Giorgos Georgopoulos released his last fictional movie, Tungsten (there’s been a documentary in the interim), one of the films included on almost all the “ten best” lists next to the likes of Yorgos Lanthimos’s Dogtooth (2009) or Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Attenberg (2010). Now he’s … Read more
What would happen if you crashed the most grounded, miserablist movie genre into the most flyaway and fantastical? Grim into Grimm. Bird is the answer, Andrea Arnold’s sixth film in 18 years. Again the great performances, again the ability to secure a name who you’d expect would be doing bigger things. Again Arnold makes us … Read more
A balding freak in white scare make-up who wore a geometric tuxedo and sang in a six-octave voice that ranged from a yelp to a bellow, Klaus Nomi’s strange, eccentric, short life is celebrated in The Nomi Song, a hymn to the artist rather than the man, though the man does keep peeping out from … Read more
If it does nothing else then Furiosa: a Mad Max Saga reminds us what a bolt from the blue Mad Max: Fury Road was. How, after a string of Mad Maxes offering diminishing thrills (I mean Beyond the Thunderdome), writer director George Miller turned to gentler pursuits – Babe, Happy Feet – before blistering back … Read more