Popular Reviews
Charley Varrick
Charley Varrick, a neo-noir from 1973, is much better than its mixed reputation would suggest. Lean and fast, dark and enigmatic, it stars Walter Matthau as a crop sprayer who heists a smalltown bank in the hope of making a fair amount of easy money. Nothing too massive, just a cushion. But when he and his sidekick come to count their haul, it turns out that it’s mostly 50s and 100s, not dollar bills, fives and tens as expected. They have inadvertently heisted a lot more money than they anticipated. This, for Charley, is a problem. It means the police will be particularly keen to get the money back. So will the bank. … Read more
Saint Omer
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, and possibly that’s what film-maker Alice Diop thought when she first started attending the trial, initially drawn in by the fact that the plaintiff was of Senegalese origin like her. Diop wasn’t there with the intention of making a film about it. Cameras aren’t allowed. But as time went by she realised that this was the subject matter … Read more
Watch on the Rhine
Remember Victor Laszlo, the most boring character in Casablanca? If you’ve ever wondered what Victor did next when he flew off into the night with his wife Ilsa, leaving Humphrey Bogart and Claude Reins to play bromantic footsie on the airport tarmac, Watch on the Rhine is as near as you’re going to get to an answer. Paul Heinried, who played Laszlo, was offered the role of the noble anti-fascist activist hero of Watch on the Rhine but turned it down, claiming he didn’t want to be typecast, leaving Paul Lukas to pick up the work (and a Best Actor Oscar) as the Laszlo near-duplicate, Kurt Muller, a German whose tireless agitating in … Read more
Becoming Led Zeppelin
When Bernard MacMahon and Allison McGourty were setting out to make Becoming Led Zeppelin they didn’t realise that surviving band members Jimmy Page, Robert Plant and John Paul Jones had all seen their TV series American Epic, about roots music in the US, and were big fans. So it came as more than a surprise to them when Page, Plant and Jones readily agreed to take part in a documentary about the crucial early days of one of the most famous rock bands of all time. They’d expected the sort of blank refusal this notoriously publicity shy band generally dished out to would-be suitors. The result is in many ways a traditional documentary, … Read more
R.M.N.
The state of the Romanian nation is what Cristian Mungiu’s films tend to be about – Occident, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Tales from the Golden Age, Beyond the Hills and Graduation have all dealt in various ways with the country’s escape (or not) from the Communist-era Ceaușescu regime and its progress towards integrating, more or less, with modern Europe. R.M.N. could be a truncated textspeak-y way of writing “Romania” but in fact it’s an acronym standing for Rezonanță Magnetică Nucleară, Magnetic Resonance Imaging in English, and that, in a sense is what the film is – a 360º scan of the nation, where the same grand game is going on as … Read more
21 October 2013-10-21
Out in the UK This Week The Conspiracy (Arrow, cert 15, Blu-ray) Mock-doc of the week is about two film-makers (Aaron Poole and James Gilbert), a pair of cocky guys who think it would be kinda cool to turn the camera on a local conspiracy nut who harangues office workers with his loudhailer. The Illuminati, the Bilderberg Group, the CIA, whatever’s going, being his currency. So far, so standard. Quick namecheck of Alan C Peterson, who is very very good as the stumbling, bumbling, frothing ranter. But at about 15 minutes in, this standard piece of “what’s true/what’s not” mockuwhatnot morphs into something altogether different, after the guys’ amateur fulminator disappears and the … Read more
The Collini Case
The Collini Case is a courtroom drama adapted from a book written by Ferdinand von Schirach, a laywer-turned-novelist in the John Grisham mould, though being German and having been born in 1964, von Schirach has a different set of concerns. He would have been about 13 when the murder of industrialist and former Nazi SS man Hanns Martin Schlayer happened in 1977, at the hands of the Red Army Faction (aka the Baader-Meinhof Gang). He doesn’t directly reference that killing but it informs his book and this film, which is set in the here and now (ish) but is concerned with old atrocities and a peculiarity of the German penal code which allowed … Read more
The Last Stop in Yuma County
The Last Stop in Yuma County is a reminder of the sort of film there used to be a lot of in the late 1990s. In that first post-Tarantino wave, low-budget film-makers would head to the desert, find a diner somewhere, load it up with gonzos and dimwits, add guns and fruity dialogue and then let the chips fall where they might. A lot were disappointing and eventually they became a chore to watch, but here’s a reminder of how good they could be when done properly. Just a few characters, not too much horsing around, tongue kept for the most part out of the cheek, a minimal situation with a sense of … Read more
A Perfect Enemy
Keeping its cards close to its chest, almost until it’s too late, A Perfect Enemy is one of those low-budget Euro-thriller co-productions that also (eventually) makes some sense of its transborder elements, particularly its cast. There are only really two people, in a “starring” sense, in any case. The Polish actor Tomasz Kot you might know from Pawel Pawlikowski’s Cold War. He plays Jeremiasz Angust, a onetime high-flier architect who’s cashed in the status jobs and become even more of a somebody by taking on work that’s strictly humanitarian – hospitals in Rwanda, and the like, he tells the audience at the Ted-style talk he’s giving as the film opens. And Athena Strates, … Read more
Petrov’s Flu
Kirill Serebrennikov, the director of Petrov’s Flu (Petrov v grippe), wasn’t at Cannes in 2021 to see his film screened, as he hadn’t been at Cannes to see his previous film, LETO, screened in 2018. He was under house arrest back home in Russia, having been accused of embezzling funds from the Seventh Studio, one of several cultural institutions he was connected to. The charges were widely seen as trumped up, part of Vladimir Putin’s ongoing fight against liberal elements in Russia – Serebrennikov is a vocal supporter of LGBT causes. Given all that background, you might expect Petrov’s Flu, a fictional work but one set in the post-Soviet era, when society had … Read more
The Usual Suspects
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 2 January Pete Postlethwaite dies, 2011 On this day in 2011, aged 64, the actor Pete Postlethwaite died of pancreatic cancer. It had been diagnosed in March 2009. Postlethwaite had already survived cancer once, having been diagnosed of testicular cancer in 1990, which went into remission after he had a testicle removed. An actor simultaneously of great force and nuance, Postlethwaite’s relatively uncommon name marks his family down as having originated in Postlethwaite in Cumbria, England (the name means Postle’s Farm). His relatively uncommon looks – huge bony cheekbones, honest putty nose, angry skin – were matched by his trajectory into … Read more
Black Adam
Black Adam is the superhero film for people who’ve had enough of them. Or it wants to be. Full of familiar elements given a dry witty twist, it stars Dwayne Johnson as an immortal creature who returns to his native city of Kahndaq to save the citizens of a brutally colonised Middle Eastern city in their hour of need. So far, so King Arthur, though Black Adam, whose name is Teth Adam at this point, is actually more like the mummy from The Mummy Returns (an early foray into acting by Johnson, all those millennia ago) crossed with the terminator from The Terminator. The Terminator comparisons gain weight when Teth Adam takes up … Read more
