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Bunny walking between cars at a traffic light

The Justice of Bunny King

One woman’s triumph against adversity – now there’s a phrase to chill the blood. Here’s what it says right under the title on the IMDb page for The Justice of Bunny King. “A triumph over adversity tale of women fighting their way back from the bottom of the barrel.” I don’t know who wrote that but what director Gaysorn Thavat’s debut feature serves up is a horse of a very different colour. The films of Ken Loach provide the most obvious reference point, particularly Cathy Come Home, one of a string of TV “plays” Loach made for the BBC in the mid 1960s. It told the story of one woman trying to triumph … Read more
Martin Scorsese

Made in England: the Films of Powell and Pressburger

Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger is another of those Michael Scorsese Does… affairs (see My Voyage to Italy), which is to say a hot letter from a fan to the object of his adoration, this time the British duo behind movies like A Matter of Life and Death and Black Narcissus. So, no criticisms are to be found of the work, nor much in the way of examination of character or psyche, except where it touches the film-making. Instead, a wholesome, honest, thorough, well-researched, expertly assembled chronological run-through of what the two men did together, fronted and narrated throughout by an admiring and generous Scorsese, who regularly cross-references what P&P … Read more
Shen An and Qu Quan fight

100 Yards

100 Yards is directed by the Xu brothers, Haofeng and Junfeng, and it’s a great martial arts movie – though any more than that is a stretch. The martial arts sequences are spectacular, the fighting epic, the moves expertly choreographed and it’s shot the proper way – so you can see how good the combatants are not how nimble the editor is. But between the spectacular set pieces things tend to go a bit limp. Gentle, if we’re being kind, or elegant maybe. It’s all set in 1920s Tianjin, which is another part of its appeal, and opens with an old kung fu master about to breathe his last. Shen An (Jacky Heung), the … Read more
farfromheaven 6301

Far from Heaven

Todd Haynes wasn’t the first director to pay homage to Douglas Sirk, creator of teary melodramas such as Magnificent Obsession and Imitation of Life. Fassbinder had had a go with Fear Eats the Soul, a homage to All That Heaven Allows. And Haynes took the same source material for Far from Heaven, which nods like a demented thing at Sirk’s magnum opus. But why turn to something so apparently unfashionable? Three big reasons immediately suggest themselves – Sirk’s sweetshop colour palette, his unashamedly lip-chewing approach, his blowsy plot lines, they are all the antithesis of arthouse film-making and an ideal starting point for an auteur hoping to stir things up, which is exactly … Read more
Noriko laughs

Late Spring

Late Spring is the title and late spring is the condition of its central character, a woman who, at the advanced age of 27, is almost too old for marriage – she’s in the late spring of her adult life. It’s 1949 and in Japan the American occupiers are running the show after the end of the Second World War. 27-year-old Noriko is the smiling, gracious, pretty and dutiful daughter of kindly widower Shukichi (Chishû Ryû). As far as he’s concerned she’s perfect in every way except one – she really doesn’t want to marry. When Noriko meets one of her father’s old colleagues, a man who has recently remarried, she tells him that … Read more
Emma punts, Steed relaxes

The Avengers: Series 4, Episode 14 – Silent Dust

Silent Dust first aired on New Year’s Eve 1965 and from a 21st-century vantage point has all the makings of a very prescient episode of The Avengers. In what starts out as an obvious parody of a nature documentary, we first observe birds nesting in the trees, then watch as the birds start dropping off the branches. The second eco-themed outing for Steed and Peel (see A Surfeit of H2O) owes a debt to Rachel Carson’s massively consequential 1962 book Silent Spring. Carson was the first to bring to public attention the doubts that many scientists had been harbouring about the effects of widely available insecticides such as DDT, and detailed the effects on … Read more
Eugene and dad Francie eye the cairn

Boys from County Hell

Boys from County Hell starts as it means to go on, mixing the mundane and the macabre in an opening scene where an ageing Irish couple watching TV have a desultory conversation about the TV show they’re watching (boring) and whether they should pop out to the local pub for a drink instead (no). And then they both start bleeding profusely from the eyes and nose. Cue screaming and opening credits. The local pub is called The Stoker, after Irish author Bram Stoker, who might well (a current hypothesis suggests) have borrowed heavily from the Irish legend of Abhartach when writing Dracula. It’s the licence writers Chris Baugh (who also directs) and Brendan … Read more
Daniel Cosgrove in They Crawl

They Crawl

Yes, They Nest was a stupid film, but it did at least have a couple of very good squirmy moments – stuff we felt if not privileged to have seen, then at least slightly sickened by. They Crawl, I’m sad to report, doesn’t. Close reading of the credits reveals no connection in terms of cast and crew (not even SFX or stunts) between the two films, meaning there’s just a personal pronoun in common, just the They. And insects, of course. However, They Crawl does hit us with two recognisable names – Tone Loc and Mickey Rourke. But fans of the Funky Cold Medina star and the one-time contender who went off to … Read more
The Road poster

The Road: A Story of Life & Death

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 25 April Red Hat Day Today is Red Hat Day. It is celebrated by members of the Red Hat Society, membership of which is open to any woman aged 50 or over. It was started in 1997 when Sue Ellen Cooper of Orange County, California, USA, gave a friend of hers a distinctive red bowler hat as a 55th birthday present, along with a copy of the poem Warning, by Jenny Joseph. Its opening lines are “When I am an old woman I shall wear purple/With a red hat that doesn’t go and doesn’t suit me.” The hat, colour scheme and … Read more
The female agents on the way to an airplane

Female Agents

Jean-Paul Salomé, director and co-writer of Female Agents (Les Femmes de l’Ombre in the original French), got the idea for his 2008 film from an obituary. While in London in 2004 he read about Lise Villameur, who’d just died aged 98. During the Second World War she’d been an agent for the French Section of Britain’s Special Operations Executive. Parachuted into France to set up her own cell and run her own agents, Villameur was described by the folk at SOE training school as “quite imperturbable… would remain cool and collected in any situation . . . she was very much ahead of her fellow students”. That’s exactly how Sophie Marceau plays Louise … Read more
The original poster for Bob Le Flambeur

Bob Le Flambeur

If you’ve seen Frank Oz’s garbled heist movie The Score, starring Robert De Niro, Marlon Brando and Edward Norton, you might have asked how come three acting legends were inveigled into appearing in something so average. The answer is Bob Le Flambeur, the “one last heist” film they obviously thought they were channelling. Reeking of the late 40s but made in the 50s just as France was about to embark on the New Wave, it is the last word in Parisian chic, a mix of Gallic savoir faire, American hats and cars, dialogue drawled out the side of the mouth and jazz pouring out of radios, bars and nightclubs. Roger Duchesne plays white-haired … Read more
Kat and Michael hug

Drunk Bus

“Inspired by real shit,” it says at the beginning of Drunk Bus, a nineties/noughties-style coming-of-age comedy taking its cues from a host of (good) films. The setting actually is “inspired” – the late-night bus on the Campus Loop taking students back to wherever they live – driven invariably by late-20s Michael (Charlie Tahan), a guy locked in the sort of frozen, boy-to-man arrested-development crisis that movies seem to exist to sort out. He drives, mostly impassively, while behind him an early montage reveals the sort of shitshow that is his nightly ordeal. The traffic cone, the drunken staggering, the making out, the rowdiness, the bare butt. Fun to doing, not so much fun … Read more

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