Reviews
How to discuss Soft & Quiet without saying too much about Soft & Quiet? There is one left-field blindsiding moment early on that changes the entire complexion of the film and which goes on to drive everything that happens in the increasingly fraught and, dare I say it, hysterical second half. Much screaming, much very … Read more
Charlotte Rampling, Donald Sutherland and Brian Blessed are the standout names in The Superlative Seven, a title suggesting this episode is going to borrow heavily from The Magnificent Seven of seven years before. In fact it’s more a reworking of Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians, with a bit of Hunger Games thrown in (appropriately, since … Read more
Ingmar Bergman released both Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal in 1957. So not one but two classics for the ages in one year from the same guy, who wasn’t very well at the time and in fact wrote the screenplay for this film in his hospital bed. Not bad going. Perhaps it’s not surprising … Read more
Hard Truths must be Mike Leigh’s most straightforwardly enjoyable movie since Topsy Turvy. Which is probably all kinds of wrong, since it’s about a woman in the grip of a depression so profound and persistent that she’s almost learned how to live with it. Leigh likes these pithy titles – High Hopes, Life Is Sweet, Naked … Read more
A supernatural comedy just like Hollywood used to make – that’s the big idea behind Eternity, Irish indie film-maker David Freyne’s arrival in the bigtime, a knowing nod to Preston Sturges and Ernst Lubitsch with a touch of Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death thrown in for fun. To be fair to Freyne … Read more
Talk about the love that dare not speak its name (to quote Oscar Wilde), Great Freedom (Große Freiheit in the original German) has a monumental love story at its centre but isn’t quite sure about expressing it. The whole film operates like this, sideways, backwards, though it starts straightforwardly enough with some footage from a … Read more
The first of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s “BRD Trilogy”, The Marriage of Maria Braun (aka Die Ehe der Maria Braun) is a canonical part of the New German Cinema era of the 1970s and in its key figure, Maria (Hanna Schygulla), gives us post-War Germany’s spectacular economic rebirth (die Wirtschaftswunder) distilled down into a single person. … Read more
“Who scalps a hairdresser?” The key line in Medusa Deluxe, an ingenious low-budget whodunit set entirely inside a regional hairdressing competition, where big characters vie to produce the hairdo that will grab the judges’ eye. Or they would have vied, if one of their number, Mosca, hadn’t wound up dead, the victim of the bizarre … Read more
A flop redeemed by time, The Lost Moment was too gothic, too excessive for 1947 but here in the 2020s it fits quite snugly in alongside the likes of The Vourdalak, Uninvited, The Girl with the Needle, The Maid or either of the recent takes on Nosferatu. An adaptation of Henry James’s The Aspern Papers, … Read more
Symmetrics. Opulence. Screwball comedy pacing. Whimsy. Deadpan. A nostalgic evocation of old Hollywood. The Phoenician Scheme must be a Wes Anderson movie and if nothing else it finally does with Bill Murray what should have been done long ago. It casts him as God. Wes Anderson. By now about 50 per cent of his potential … Read more
Worth is a film about 9/11 and its aftermath and if you were about on that day and old enough to take in what was going on you might feel there’s little reason to watch it… The shock was so intense and keenly felt that 2001 still seems so present, no reminder necessary, thanks. There … Read more
Let’s do a refugee drama, which no one wants to watch, as a haunted house movie, which everyone does. That’s the thinking behind His House, a canny mix of genres from writer/director Remi Weekes in his feature debut, which adds a further layer of originality by adding all sorts of weird African supernatural juju to … Read more