Popular Reviews
The Avengers: Series 6, Episode 23 – Take Me to Your Leader
Coined as a film-making term by Alfred Hitchcock collaborator Angus McPhail, the Macguffin (spell it anyway you like) is a simple plot device which doesn’t do much on its own, but acts as a string on which a number of scenes can be strung, lending an illusion of wholeness to something which, without it, would just be a jumble. Take Me to Your Leader is the Macguffin idea at its purest, the driver of an effectively brisk and noticeably slick episode of The Avengers, written by Terry Nation and directed by Robert Fuest – pretty much the A team by this stage in the proceedings. The device? A red briefcase, one that talks, … Read more
Our Man in Havana
A quick look at the list of ingredients and the people involved would probably be enough to convince most people that 1959’s Our Man in Havana was going to be a cracker – but it isn’t. It’s a cake full of good things that isn’t, in itself, a good cake. Pity. The promising components include Graham Greene’s screenplay, the presence of Carol Reed as director – these two had already given the world The Third Man and The Fallen Idol – Alec Guinness in a lead role, plus excellent support players including Noël Coward, Ralph Richardson, Burl Ives and Maureen O’Hara, with location shooting in Cuba just post the Castro revolution and cinematography … Read more
The Avengers: Series 6, Episode 20 – Wish You Were Here
After a couple of Tara-lite outings, a Steed-lite one for fans of Linda Thorson, who rises to the occasion in a fairly jokey episode, Wish You Were Here, which sees The Avengers doffing its hat to The Prisoner, whose 13 episodes had blazed across 1967 and 1968 (and continue to be talked about all these decades later). The premise behind Tony Williamson’s screenplay is laid out neatly in the opening sequence – two men, Brevitt and Merrydale (played by David Garth and Liam Redmond) discussing what appears to be a jailbreak. But when the camera pulls back… ta daaa… it turns out they are in fact guests at what looks like a high-class … Read more
Long Live Freedom
There aren’t many films about passion in politics, the oeuvre of Leni Riefenstahl to one side. But that’s what you get in writer/director Roberto Andò’s Viva la libertà (Long Live Freedom), the tale of a political party re-energised by an injection of vigour at the top. For vigour read madness. The great Toni Servillo plays two roles. In one he’s the lacklustre leader of an Italian political party who, having been badly heckled at a meeting, does a bunk one night and winds up hiding out in Paris at the home of an old flame. While Enrico hunkers down – eventually finding a gig working incognito on a film set – the party … Read more
American Beauty
London theatre director Sam Mendes’s debut as a movie director has been treated by some critics as if it were a missive from the gods. Perhaps it was the opening scene which showed Kevin Spacey jerking off in the shower which did it for them – so bold, so adult. The film locks straight in to a long line of suburban dystopian drama and hangs its story off the jowls of Spacey, playing the worm that turned, the comfortable middle-class corporate Joe who chucks it all in for the easy release of drugs and sex after he becomes infatuated with his daughter’s best friend (Mena Suvari). His wife, meanwhile, is filling in the … Read more
Rocks
Rocks is the director Sarah Gavron’s best fiction feature to date, beating Brick Lane and Suffragette to top honours thanks to outstandingly fresh performances from a cast of actors who deserve all the praise that’s been heaped on them. It’s a simple and fairly familiar story. Rocks (Bukky Bakray) is a London inner-city kid, feisty and formidable, fast of mouth, quick of wit, older in attitude than her 13 years. One day her mother simply disappears from the council block she shares with Rocks and much younger brother Emmanuel (D’angelou Osei Kissiedu), leaving behind a note saying she’s gone off somewhere to “clear my head” plus a bit of money intended to tide … Read more
House of Hummingbird
Why is House of Hummingbird called House of Hummingbird? I’ve got no idea, and watching this South Korean coming-of-ager hasn’t enlightened me. Can anyone help? Answers below if you can. Maybe I missed something. Odd in a way, because the film itself is as clear as day and is told in a bright, clear manner, by actors with open, honest faces, particularly Park Ji-Hu, who plays schoolgirl Eun-hee. This is her story. She’s an average kind of schoolgirl with an interest in comics and drawing. Life at home is a bit tense. Her brother bullies her a bit, her older sister is skipping out at night to see her boyfriend, mum and dad … Read more
Shame
Shame is Ingmar Bergman’s war movie. Except, being an Ingmar Bergman movie, it’s really about relationships, a marriage in trouble (probably Bergman’s own – number four was heading for the exit), and something else on top. Kriget (The War) was Bergman’s original title for it, but Skammen (literally, The Shame) is what Bergman settled on. So, not a generalised Shame but a specific instance of it. What that shame might be precisely is what Bergman will eventually reveal, but he starts out by painting a portrait of two former orchestral musicians (wife number four, Käbi Laretei was a concert pianist) who have given it all up to live the good life, growing and selling … Read more
Because That Road Is Trodden
Because That Road Is Trodden is included as a bonus item on the BFI’s release of Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush. It’s a strange extra, not thematically linked, no personnel in common. Both were shot in the UK towards the end of the 1960s, this at Bryanston School, a fee-paying private school in Dorset, Mulberry Bush in working class Stevenage New Town. By British standards these places are not even geographically close. It’s a strange and short film, moody and woozy, about a day in the life of someone called only The Boy (Sebastian Tombs) from waking up in the morning onwards (though minute to minute this is not). It was … Read more
A Boy Called Christmas
A superhero origin story of sorts, A Boy Called Christmas is slightly vague about the costumed crusader it has in mind. Is it Saint Nicholas, aka Santa Claus? Or his pagan predecessor, Father Christmas, the white-bearded giftbringer who “flew” through the winter night on his fleet-footed steed possibly with a hallucinogenic aerial assist from fly agaric mushrooms? Slight quibble to one side, this is actually a nice, sweet, middle-of-the-road story about a boy’s Christmas-y fairytale quest to find Elfhelm, home of the elves, and it builds gently and unexceptionally towards a an emotional climax that might catch you off guard. The Princess Bride is the quasi-template, with Maggie Smith in the Peter Falk … Read more
Beau Is Afraid
Three’s a trend, so they say, and with Beau Is Afraid writer/director Ari Aster does just what his previous two films, Hereditary and Midsommar, did – he gets everyone talking. Terrible, some said. Brilliant, said others. Maybe it can be both at the same time, you could conclude, sitting right on the fence. And, fence-sitting coming naturally to some people, that is what it is – a brilliant meta-movie that simply doesn’t know when to stop and so outstays its welcome. In one of many comedy moments which seem less well advised the longer Beau Is Afraid goes on – it’s three hours long – Aster starts the action at the moment Beau … Read more
And Then We Danced
The very trad meets meets the very not in And Then We Danced, a pungently flavoured drama about a wild love affair between two men who dance with the Georgian national troupe. Black Swan and Flashdance are the two most obvious points of reference, as punishing regimes take thir physical toll and rivalries for the top slot combine with a push to innovate against the dead hand of tradition, the entire raison d’etre of a troupe like the one that Merab (Levan Gelbakhiani) dances in. He’s perhaps not the best, the most naturally gifted dancer in the troupe, but he’s prepared to do whatever is necessary to make the grade and get into … Read more
