Popular Reviews
1448 Love Among Us
In the 2014 Thai film 1448 Love Among Us, both the “1448” and the “Us” of the title are significant, the former the section of the Thai penal code restricting marriage to heterosexual people and the latter an indicator that this film is very much a movie for domestic consumption. Even so, for drama lovers there’s enough in here to slake the thirst, while issue-seekers are more obviously catered for. The opening shot sets the tone – two pretty young women in bridal white getting married to each other, in a ceremony presided over by an official who has her reservations but who wishes Pim (Apinya Sakuljaroensuk) and Pat (Isabella Lete) well, as … Read more
Dazed and Confused
Dazed and Confused is Richard Linklater’s 1993 film doing for 1976 what George Lucas’s American Graffiti (1973) did for 1962. That is, it looks back fondly at a group of teenagers on the cusp of adult life on their last day/night of high school, while also observing how long ago it now all was, and in more than plain old years. Like Lucas’s gang, Linklater’s crew are a mixed crowd of jocks and nerds, lookers and plain-Janes and Johns, sensitive souls and bozos, cool kids and the terminally awkward, kids whose best days are to come and those whose lives have already peaked. The style builds on the loose, superficially disorganised approach of … Read more
Fast and Furious 9
Call it what you like, Fast & Furious 9 – or F9, or F9: The Fast Saga – is no good, a terrible disappointment in a franchise that in a 20-year run has managed to be one of the most reliable suppliers of screen fun, banter and action. However, F&F has proved to be totally bombproof thus far, having survived the permanent loss of franchise mainstays (Paul Walker), temporary absences (Vin Diesel, Michelle Rodriguez, Jordana Brewster), a reverse takeover by Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham (who have now been shunted off to their own spinoff, the Hobbs & Shaw franchise). It even survived the loss of director Justin Lin, who picked up the … Read more
Zack Snyder’s Justice League
The day I sat down to watch Zack Snyder’s Justice League, the death of Jim Steinman, songwriter for Meat Loaf, among many others, had just been announced. And it occurred to me about halfway through watching that this epic is a case of same/same: a big, loud, glorious, ever-crescendoing Bat Out of Hell of a movie. Snyder himself pops up before the action gets going, to say a big thank you to the fans who hash-tagged his version of the movie into existence with a #ReleaseTheSnyderCut campaign. They were disappointed with the original 2017 version, which, having fought a guerrilla campaign against the Warner Bros suits, Snyder finally abandoned after his daughter died. … Read more
Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)
Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised), what a treasure trove of spine-tingling musical goodies this film is. “Directed” by Questlove, whose role is really more curatorial and editorial, it’s a compendium of highlights from a series of six free concerts held on Sundays in Harlem from June to August 1969. Billed at the time as The Black Woodstock, after legendary festival which was being held upstate at around the same time. There were around 40 hours of performances recorded, and most of it has lain abandoned in a basement ever since it was shot by producer Hal Tulchin. Tulchin’s plans to get it a wider distribution came to … Read more
The Avengers: Series 5, Episode 17 – Return of the Cybernauts
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 the other), chosen, presumably, because it had a big-name star in the shape of Peter Cushing in its cast, because it was something of a fan favourite and, I’m also guessing, because the production values were more polished than they had been hitherto. Because the show had been Emmy nominated, the ABC network ordered more, of which this … Read more
The Holdovers
It’s easy to see The Holdovers as Alexander Payne’s riposte to all the moaning that Martin Scorsese and a few other members of the old guard were doing not so long ago about the predominance of superhero movies and how, you know, they don’t make ’em like they used to etc etc. Payne has gone out and made one like they used to, a film set in 1971 attempting to look like a film from 1971 (right down to the “copyright MCMLXXI” buried in the credits) – grainy, human-focused, often ensemble works like American Graffiti or The Godfather or the entire oeuvre of John Cassavetes. The action is set at a fancy school … Read more
The Avengers: Series 3, Episode 22 – The Outside-In Man
Whether The Avengers is or isn’t a spy series depends very much on the episode you watch. In The Outside-In Man we’re very much in spy mode, right from the opening scene, in which Steed is seen walking into a butcher’s shop. Then, Man from Uncle style (which was in development when this episode aired in February 1964), he walks from the front of the shop and into the walk-in fridge with the butcher, who immediately drops his Cockney accent to brief him on his job. Butcher/control Quilpie (Ronald Radd) is an M-like figure and has a secretary (Virginia Stride) called Alice but in demeanour and function her name might as well be … Read more
The Traitor
The Corleones weren’t fictional. There really was a crime family called the Corleonesi, after the town in Sicily where they came from. In The Traitor (Il traditore in the original Italian) we learn what happened when the Corleonesi fell out with a fellow mob family, in a dramatisation of the true story of Tommaso Buscetta, the crime boss who went “pentito” and sang like a canary to the authorities. Buscetta (Pierfrancesco Favino) wasn’t a Corleonesi, he was from the other mob, and as Marco Bellocchio’s film opens Buscetta is in Brazil, where he’s living in happy early retirement, having divined that war between rival mobs was imminent, that it was going to be … Read more
Seriously Red
“Find out who you are and then do it on purpose.” Seriously Red starts out with this pithy aphorism from Dolly Parton then dives into the story of Raylene “Red” Delaney, an Australian property valuer who really really wants to be the Tennessee country star herself. Red is a lovely woman but a terrible valuer, and director Gracie Otto and writer Krew Boylan’s film wastes no time in getting her fired from her job for being too empathetic, not quite pencil-skirted enough, and then putting Red on the road to glamour and glory as she goes all in on being a Dolly impersonator. But can you be true to yourself by being someone … Read more
Enys Men
How the hell do you follow Bait? A movie made for nothing shot on 16mm on a wind-up Bolex, an experiment, more or less, which somehow got off Dr Frankenstein’s table and made it into the big wide world. If you don’t know what I’m talking about… shakes head. Enys Men is the answer, writer/director Mark Jenkin’s bold sideways move into colour but using the same basic equipment – wind-up camera, 16mm film (later digitised and then massively colour graded) – and with the sound post-dubbed. A tiny crew, a handful of actors, with the vast bulk of the action focusing on Mary Woodvine, who plays The Volunteer, a woman on a remote … Read more
eXistenZ
Combining two fields of interest of director David Cronenberg – the mediated-reality musings of Videodrome and the body horror of almost everything else he’s done – eXistenZ is about a video game designer dropping into the gamesworld she’s created, accompanied by a good-looking marketing trainee, to work out if it still all works after an assassination attempt on its creator. Jude Law is handsome and chiselled and pretty much perfect as the slightly blank computer-game virgin and Jennifer Jason Leigh also scores high as the programmer who’s developed a gaming environment so realistic that it makes real life look lacklustre. This parallel reality where industrial and organic coalesce (a gun that shoots human … Read more
