Reviews
Like a classic album that warms us up with an opening track before hitting us with a doozy, episode two of series four of The Avengers, The Gravediggers, is vintage entertainment that gets just about everything right. The plot is a mix of proper spy stuff and the eccentric, the macabre and the mad, and … Read more
A train heads from Peking to Shanghai and a woman from disgrace to redemption in 1932’s Shanghai Express, the fourth collaboration between director Josef von Sternberg and star Marlene Dietrich. Another transformation is evident, of Dietrich, from the plubby Mädchen in The Blue Angel two years before to the star who’s all cheekbones and chiselled … Read more
Watching the struggles of Syrian refugees in Western Europe isn’t everyone’s idea of fun, so how about a spy thriller instead? That seems to be the idea behind Ghost Trail, which manages to have it both ways – the miseries of a life in exile and the thrill of the chase as its hero chases … Read more
In 2013 a young mother named Fabienne Kabou left her baby on a French beach to be swept away by the tide. Saint Omer is the wistful, powerful, thoughtful and, ultimately, rather sad fictionalisation of the trial that ensued when Kabou ended up in the court on the charge. Open and shut, you’d have thought, … Read more
In one hour 1942’s Time to Kill achieves what a lot of much longer films fail to do. It delivers a story while painting a picture of a time, a place and the people in it, and is highly entertaining, amusing and dramatic. The fact that it’s based on a Raymond Chandler story helps – … Read more
At the beginning of The Equalizer 3 we appear to be in familiar “action hero in retirement” territory. A sunny place. Beautiful scenery. The camera drinking it all in. Surely, any minute we’ll be meeting Denzel Washington in a Hawaiian shirt, a cocktail in one hand, a pretty young woman on his arm, in much … Read more
One of the great puzzles about Sergio Corbucci’s 1968 spaghetti western The Great Silence (Il Grande Silenzio) is how shakily it starts. In one gruesomely unsteady shot after another, using lenses that are way too long, cinematographer Silvano Ippoliti appears to be putting on a demonstration of the genre’s technical shortcomings. Distant figures swing wildly … Read more
“Life is goddam black and I photograph life.” Andre De Toth’s thumbnail manifesto is perfectly illustrated by Play Dirty, his last film and one of his ugliest. Critics hated it, though you sense it was the nihilism of the movie they really had an issue with rather than the various issues they cited. War is … Read more
The film that killed its star, Hangover Square is an adaptation of Patrick Wilson’s most popular novel, a moody noir set in gaslit, foggy London and with a psychoanalytical element that marks it out as a beast lumbering out of the 1940s. There’s a lot to like here but the first thing to grab the … Read more
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
A reconstruction of what happened on 11 September 2001 to the fourth hijacked plane, which went down in Pennsylvania before getting to its target in Washington DC, probably the White House. It’s shot in a documentary-like shaky-cam style, has not a single recognisable face to hook onto and there’s a complete absence of heroic Hollywood … Read more
Absolutely one for the buffs, Resurrection is Bi Gan’s love letter and farewell to cinema. It’s dead is the overall message, but didn’t we have a lot of good times while it was here? A five-part compendium, each chunk different in terms of tone, look and genre, it’s a remarkable technical achievement, if nothing else. … Read more