Reviews
When the British Film Institute celebrated 50 Years of Emma Peel in 2015, as well as interviewing the venerable Dame Diana Rigg – halfway through her run on Game of Thrones at the time – the BFI screened two episodes of Peel-era Avengers show. Return of the Cybernauts was one (The House That Jack Built … Read more
Written on the hoof while shooting on his previous film, Ashes of Time, was paused, Wong Kar-Wai’s Chungking Express is one of the defining films of the 1990s and, thanks to Wong’s remarkable approach to storytelling, one of the great films of all time. It’s two stories in one, or one story told two ways, … Read more
Yi Yi was the last feature film Edward Yang made. He died in 2007, of cancer of the colon, seven years after this, his most popular, most successful, most widely praised film, which is itself, appropriately, all about transitions from one life phase to another. Yang was one of the key players in the Taiwanese … Read more
This may not be the best film out this week, but it is the one that is shouting loudest. Who doesn’t want to see Anthony Hopkins return to the role of Hannibal the Cannibal after several years of haggling over his fee, which includes an agreement to make one more film featuring everyone’s favourite cultured … Read more
Dull rather than dim,The Matrix Resurrections reanimates the corpse of the original and best of the previous three Matrix movies and sets off in the right direction before bogging down in the sort of world-building, lore-laden plotting that hobbled numbers two and three. Some years have passed and Thomas Anderson (aka Neo aka The One … Read more
A moving target is harder to hit. That must be why OK Connery goes by so many different titles. The perfectly reasonable Operation Kid Brother is one alternative, the frankly bizarre Divided Evil another. Probably the most informative of all the variants, apart from the original, is Operation Double 007. If I tell you that … Read more
Seventeen years after he made My Beautiful Laundrette, Stephen Frears washes London’s dirty laundry again. Dirty Pretty Things is an ambitious, worthwhile drama digging into the spoil heap of the capital’s invisible underclass. And if that sounds about as glamourous and interesting as council housing, it is – until its hero, Okwe (Chiwetel Ejiofor) discovers a … Read more
Barry Lyndon tends to get summed up in one of two ways. It’s either Stanley Kubrick’s visually sensational magnum opus and a triumph of film-making at every level, or it’s a bit of a bore, a “one thing after another” drama with not much actual drama in it. Both are true. Adapting William Makepeace Thackeray’s … Read more
If there’s a prize for the dourest sci-fi movie ever made, surely Dead Man’s Letters would win it. Sometimes the original Russian title, Pisma Myortvogo Cheloveka is translated as Letters from a Dead Man, which is hardly any jollier. While Blade Runner or Solaris or Dark City or Threads will all have their advocates, this … Read more
Hit Man is not really about a hit man. It’s about a guy who pretends to be one to lure potential perps into showing their hand. He’s whatever the male version of the honey trap is, and in this fictionalised retelling of the story of real-life dude Gary Johnson he is played by Glen Powell. … Read more
If you’re over the age of eight, Gabby’s Dollhouse: The Movie is probably not something you’ll have come across, or the Netflix show it sprang from. Its star, Laila Lockhart Kraner, probably won’t mean much to you either. Your loss? This intensely likeable, positive, bright and sunny excitement isn’t a “something for everybody” offer. But … Read more
Men are largely an irrelevance in So Close, Corey Yuen’s “girls with guns” actioner made in 2002 just as Hong Kong was exiting its glory period. I prompted Google in AI mode to list the key characteristics of the “girls with guns” genre were. It said – Hong Kong, female protagonists, gunplay and stunts, challenging … Read more