Reviews
There’s a remake of 1989’s The Killer in the works, with Nathalie Emmanuel and Omar Sy in lead roles. But can it match up to the original, even with original director John Woo calling the shots. I believe it’s Emmanuel as the assassin in the update/reimagining, but it was Chow Yun-Fat way back when, as … Read more
Borgman is one of those head-scratching “what what?” movies which would be entirely transformed if the writer/director gave us access to a vital piece of missing information. But Alex van Warmerdam doesn’t, and so we watch and try to piece together what’s going on from clues scattered throughout, like following Hansel and Gretel’s trail through … Read more
Ernst Lubitsch’s 1932 drama Broken Lullaby was originally called The Man I Killed, like the Maurice Rostand play it was based on (L’homme que j’ai tué). It turned out to be a title too hard-hitting for the box office and so it was decided to change it. To The Fifth Commandment. Until some bright spark … Read more
You don’t, in the normal run of things, expect a rape scene in old-time animation, but that’s what you get in 1926’s The Adventures of Prince Achmed, the breakthrough for Lotte Reiniger, a pioneer in her field, artistically and technically. It tells the story of the an eastern prince who steps in to help his … 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
There were two dramatised features about the working methods of director Alfred Hitchcock in 2012. Hitchcock starred a pretty decent Anthony Hopkins as the corpulent director. But today it’s The Girl, a more obviously made-for-TV affair. It’s an HBO/BBC collaboration, with actors who bump it up the pecking order – Toby Jones as a dead-eyed Hitchcock, … Read more
Old Guys R Us: Part Two – Sisu: Road to Revenge repeats the formula of the first movie, of the iron-hard old Finnish dude taking on unimaginable numbers of bad guys… and prevailing, in a vastly entertaining way. He’s John Wick in a beard, transposed back to the 1940s. First time around the enemy was … Read more
Cruella, like Maleficent, gives a female baddie an origin story, and ends up in the same cul-de-sac, insisting that here is one of the female baddies for the ages, while at the same time asking us to sympathise with a poor Disney dear who’s been badly treated. 101 dogs’ breakfasts is the result. Since Emma … Read more
Huesera: the Bone Woman opens and ends with spectacular images – of a gigantic golden Virgin Mary at a shrine to start, and of a writhing mass of naked zombie-like creatures to finish. In themselves they’re impressive but they also offer a distilled show-and-tell of the shift in tone Mexican director Michelle Garza Cervera has … Read more
It’s remarkable that in film and TV adaptations of William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, it’s always called just that. Thackeray lifted the title for his satire from John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, where a fair at a town called Vanity was an allegory for all the delights of the realm of the physical. It’s hardly a … Read more
As you might expect, Riefenstahl is a documentary about Leni Riefenstahl, “Hitler’s favourite film-maker”. The director of Triumph of the Will and Olympia, Riefenstahl’s career was first boosted and then destroyed by her association with the Führer. She insisted to the grim end – she died aged 101 in 2003 – that she was enthusiastic for … Read more
Spanish director Rodrigo Sorogoyen reportedly said he wanted to make The Beasts (As Bestas, in Spanish) “as a western”. To a large extent that’s what he’s done. This is like a western where two opposing and implacable forces square off in a lawless milieu. John Ford might have made this, back in the day. If … Read more