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Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon

Reno 911!: Miami

A feature length version of the Comedy Central TV show. And, obeying a law that stretches back at least to the dawn of TV comedy, the format goes on holiday. To Miami, as the title suggests, where Reno’s precinct of variously useless cops suddenly find themselves the only police in town with a drug lord to contain called Ethan the Drug Lord (played by Paul Rudd) and day-to-day policing duties to carry out. Obeying another law, there’s the odd guest cameo – Danny DeVito in this case (his Jersey Films outfit are bankrolling the movie so it makes sense). But who cares about guests or the plot – no one involved seems to – … Read more
Sonny Chiba as train driver Aoki

The Bullet Train

Disaster movies summed up in one factoid: Airport (1970) to Airplane! (1980). You’re welcome. The Bullet Train comes slap dang in the middle, 1975, and though it’s often sold as being the inspiration for 1994’s Speed, which it is, it’s just as significant for being a grand summing-up of the entire disaster movie genre. Let’s deal with the Speed stuff first. A bomb has been fitted to one particular Japanese bullet train, or shinkansen (Shinkansen daibakuha is the Japanese title), on the Tokyo to Hakata route. Once the train reaches 80kph the bomb becomes armed. After that, if the speed drops below 80kph, the bomb will detonate. So far, so Sandra Bullock. But … Read more
Sophie and Karin

Pilots

Pilots (Pilotinnen) was Christian Petzold’s graduation film, a short feature-length drama which he completed in 1995. At 35, Petzold was quite ancient as students go but he’d studied German and theatre already before switching into film at Berlin’s DFFB. Either way, his film got a showing on the German TV channel ZDF, which isn’t bad at all for a graduation movie. It’s clearly the work of someone who technically is still learning how the vehicle works but thematically knows exactly where he’s heading. It’s not so much Petzold in utero as Petzold in miniature. It’s a two-hander, in essence, and once Petzold has thrown us with an opening shot suggesting that his troubled … Read more
Rebecca Pidgeon and Philip Seymour Hoffman in State and Main

State and Main

An intelligent and acidic if somewhat stagey comedy about a film production descending on a small New England town and the effect that each has on the other. It’s written and directed by David Mamet, not known for out and out comedy, but clearly feeling flighty at the moment, flighty enough to turn out the sort of farce you might expect from the French, or from Michael Frayn. And Mamet has the cast to perform it – Philip Seymour Hoffman, William H. Macy, Julia Stiles and a surprisingly good Alec Baldwin, all of them upping their game in homage to a master of the blunt misanthropic object who has spent enough time writing … Read more
Alexandre and Aðalbjörg in a field

The Noise of Engines

At the Raindance film festival, London, UK, 27 October–6 November 2021 French-Canadian film-maker Philippe Grégoire’s debut feature The Noise of Engines (Le bruit des moteurs) starts off with various shots of cars donutting away in rubber-burning circles, going nowhere, but fast. It’s a metaphor, of sorts, for a story about a young man who seems to be going nowhere, but slowly. Perhaps the contrast is a deadpan joke. There is a lot of deadpan joking going on here. The story is a lift from Grégoire’s own life. He worked part-time for the Canadian customs force to finance his way through college and he comes from a small town near the border with the … Read more
Mary crawls out of the river

Carnival of Souls

Shot in three weeks by a guy on a break from his real job, 1962’s Carnival of Souls is a spooky thriller about a woman who somehow survives a fatal car accident then drifts around for the rest of the movie like a restless spirit in a too-concrete world. It’s been described as something like an extended episode of the Twilight Zone – something like the Black Mirror of its day – which is largely down to the spectral, evocative organ score by Gene Moore, as well as the gotcha reveal at the finish, which won’t gotcha anyone who’s consuming as much media product as 21st-century audiences do. Director Herk Harvey said he … Read more
Emmy Rossum and Gerard Butler in The Phantom of the Opera

The Phantom of the Opera

It’s something of a minor industry to make fun of Andrew Lloyd Webber. But with this film version of his stage phenomenon (billions of dollars at box offices worldwide, and counting) it looks like the musical lord is once more going to be having the last laugh. It’s a story we all know – a hideously disfugured creature, endowed with a gift for music, yearns for the love of a pretty, young singer. He tutors her and turns her into a star. But could she ever love him? It’s often said that the story is a coded version of the relationship between Lloyd Webber and his ex-wife, Sarah Brightman. Brightman was the original … Read more
Mother and daughter cower

Settlers

Settlers is a sci-fi film so far away from what people usually term sci-fi that it barely qualifies. In fact it opens looking like a western – big craggy mountains in a dusty landscape – and then plays out like a wildlife documentary. The sort of wildlife documentary where a new male lion arrives on the scene, kills the old leader of the pride and then moves in with the lionesses who were already there. It’s the law of the savannah. In this scenario the existing cubs usually get killed, a fact innately understood by young Remmy (Brooklynn Prince) after new male Jerry (Ismael Cruz Córdova) arrives at their remote settlement, displaces dad … Read more
The bear on the rampage

Cocaine Bear

As “the title is the movie” movies go, Cocaine Bear is up there with Snakes on a Plane. Plot: a large shipment of cocaine falls out of a plane and a black bear gets hold of it, tries it and likes it. It’s very moreish. Addicted, she (it’s a lady bear) is soon on a stimulant-induced rampage through the national park where she lives, in search of more of the parcel-taped bundles containing the precious white powder… and woe betide any human who gets in the way. It was just Samuel L Jackson in Snakes on a Plane but there are a whole bunch of people at the wrong end of an angry bear … Read more
Jeon Do-yeon

Beasts Clawing at Straws

Beasts Clawing at Straws also goes by the English-language title of Beasts That Cling to the Straw but Rats in a Sack would also be a useful way of translating its original Korean title. It’s a story about different sets of people, all connected by a Louis Vuitton holdall full of cash, which we first see in the movie’s opening shot. Then, in 1960s heist-movie opening-credit style, the camera follows the holdall at its level while an unidentified someone carries it to a left luggage locker and leaves it there. As the movie ends, the bag is once again picked up and the camera follows it, again at bag height, off out onto … Read more
Joe finds the money

Side Street

An overwrought civics lesson done as film noir, Side Street sees Farley Granger’s humble postman making one tiny mistake and finding himself in deep trouble. One minute he’s trading small talk with a cop in the bright daylight, the next he’s mixing with murderers, femmes fatales and other unsavoury sorts and has become a creature of the night. In Side Street, when you fall, you fall. No wonder it flopped – it’s overcooked. And it did flop, badly. So much so that its director, Anthony Mann, abandoned film noir for good and headed off into the hills where a career making highly regarded westerns beckoned. But all that was in the future. First … Read more
Jude Akuwudike as Mofe

This Is My Desire

“Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans” – to borrow a phrase often credited to John Lennon – is the movie This Is My Desire (aka Eyimofe) distilled down to an essence. Told in distinct chapters subtitled Spain and Italy, it follows two denizens of Lagos, Nigeria, and dives into their lives while they wait for the passports and paperwork that will allow them to seek a better life elsewhere. First up, Mofe, and in the film’s opening shot – a tangle of wires bursting like mattress stuffing from an ancient electrical junction box – a metaphor for the whole film. Messy, potentially dangerous, lives lived hugger-mugger in a … Read more

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