Reviews
I Love You Again is a knockabout Hollywood farce, a cock-eyed “comedy of remarriage” – The Philadelphia Story is the king of the genre – done in rat-a-rat style by the crack team of director WS Van Dyke and his stars, William Powell and Myrna Loy. Van Dyke was known as One Take Woody, for reasons … Read more
So what else did Darth Vader do? It’s often forgotten that James Earl Jones, the voice (though not the body – that was Dave Prowse) behind the galaxy’s most badass dad had an acting life away from Star Wars. Exhibit A – 1974’s Claudine, in which he goes toe to toe with Diahann Carroll in … 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
Leigh Whannell started as an actor, became a writer – of the horror franchise Saw and its sequels most notably – became a producer, then eventually a director. Upgrade is his second film behind the camera, having familiarised himself with the controls on Insidious: Chapter 3. Here he wears all the hats apart from the … Read more
Full of guys with nicknames like Mutt, Shivvy and Whitey, 1948’s The Street with No Name is your tough, streetwise crime drama making many claims to authentiticity. It was one of a run of “semi-documentary” movies made around this time, often by Twentieth Century-Fox, and shot out on the streets, in the bars and at … Read more
Is it possible to reject the big idea but still like the movie? Exhibit A: The Drama, a producers’ wet dream of casting – Robert Pattinson and Zendaya – and a strange hybrid of the talky New York dramedy, of the sort Woody Allen made his own, and a horror film. Woody Allen done as … Read more
Sisu is the return to form that Finnish director Jalmari Helander’s fans were hoping for. If he’d died after his feature debut, 2010’s Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale, he could have shuffled off to Tuonela knowing he’d made a funny, grisly Christmas movie like no other. But he followed up with Big Game, an attempt … 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
If you want porn, there’s Pornhub, if you want a frank, unapologetic drama about the porn industry, try Pleasure, a Star Is Born (or not) story of a 19-year-old Swedish blow-in trying to make it in LA. Cocks and pussies are not prominent, in other words, though there are enough of them to convince us … Read more
“A bit crap,” is what I wrote in my notes towards the end of watching The Avengers episode Legacy of Death. Perhaps I was being too harsh. My memory of it now is of being a pleasingly entertaining episode, and that’s largely down to the work of Stratford Johns and Ronald Lacey, who do a … Read more
There are two films from 2019 called Beats, both heavily into music. This is the other one – British (Scottish, more specifically) and set in the 1990s world of rave culture. I haven’t seen the American Beats, hip-hop to the core, so can’t say which one comes out on top but Brian Welsh’s Beats sets … Read more
There’s nothing wrong with Ghostbusters: Afterlife at all, apart from its strange reluctance to reference Ghostbusters, the 2016 reboot directed by Paul Feig. The one that exercised a lot of bedwetters with its “controversial” cast with a lot of women in it. It wasn’t very good, but not because it starred Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, … Read more