Reviews
In a world where the excellent is often the enemy of the good, what about The 39 Steps? Not Hitchcock’s 1935 classic, but the 1959 remake starring Kenneth More? So often compared to the original, so often reviled – especially in its native UK – the 1959 version is actually a pretty good stab at … Read more
The rom-com has traditionally featured an alpha couple and a beta couple. This allowed the alpha couple do the serious mooning about, while the beta couple handled the comedy and dispensed sound, often snarky, advice. However, since Richard Curtis’s successful if frequently painful Love, Actually, there’s been an attempt to get more people in on … Read more
A kind of meta-The Mousetrap, See How They Run plonks itself down on the sofa alongside the other representatives of the whodunit revival – the likes of Knives Out and Kenneth Branagh’s adaptations of Agatha Christie. In essence it’s Agatha Christie’s venerable long-running play subjected to mock trial by a thousand in-jokes, some knowing, others … Read more
Sputnik is a movie from 2020 set in the Soviet era. As well as having a fantastic story thick with allegorical possibilities, it also feels like a movie from the Soviet era – as if half inch steel plate had been riveted together. There are touches of pure Hollywood too, not least in the character of … Read more
Yo ho ho and a bottle of something very rum, this second instalment of Gore Verbinski’s money-spinner is a swirling follow-on from part one and a dizzying lead into part three – it’s all midsection in other words. Tonally, it’s Monty Python’s Life of Blackbeard, but with one big difference. It’s not funny. The question … Read more
Four years before George Romero is supposed to have revived the genre, the zombies are already alive and kicking (well, shuffling) in 1964 in The Last Man on Earth, a lurid yet oddly static example of a genre movie with all the signs of something knocked out with little respect for its audience. Unsurprisingly it … Read more
The latest of the Marvel comics franchise is the most expensive film ever made but carries on just like the earlier two – lots of characters chasing too little plot. If you can call a po-faced allegory about society’s treatment of difference a plot. As ever Halle Berry looks nice, Hugh Jackman throws his chest … Read more
Sex as war. Breasts as breastplates. 1984’s L’Année des Méduses translates literally as Year of the Medusas but is usually rendered more tamely and less aptly in English as Year of the Jellyfish. Director Christopher Frank (who also wrote the book) sets out his stall straight away. A shot of two cocktails in tall glasses … Read more
As mad and excessive as the king it portrays, Luchino Visconti’s Ludwig – about the “mad” King Ludwig II (1845-1886) of Bavaria – is a vast, sprawling and sumptuous catalogue of the excesses of a monarch clearly off his chump. It got hammered by the US critics when it opened there in 1973 – the … Read more
Let’s get straight to the verdict. Dune: Part Two is visually spectacular but dramatically inert, the good stuff attributable to its remarkable director Denis Villeneuve, the bad stuff down to the writer of the original novel/doorstop, Frank Herbert. This is not going to be how everyone sees it, of course, what sort of a world … Read more
HBO’s documentary A Choice of Weapons: Inspired by Gordon Parks does a great service for ignoramuses (like me) who mistakenly had Parks pegged as the guy who directed Shaft and a few other films and maybe dabbled in photojournalism earlier in this life. He was so much more. Born in 1912, Gordon Parks came of … Read more
I started out watching So Pretty convinced it was “not for me” but by the time it had finished I wondered if I was precisely its target audience. Me? Gammon-faced guy whose exposure to trans culture extends about as far as an evening in Soho’s (London) infamous drag bar Madame JoJo’s once, quite a while … Read more