Popular Reviews
Backwards Faces
All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun, Jean-Luc Godard said, stealing/borrowing an axiom first coined by DW Griffith. What, even to make a multiverse movie? When Dr Strange in the Multiverse of Madness started being eclipsed by Everything Everywhere All at Once last year, Jamie Lee Curtis was all over the twittersphere saying how proud she was of their “little movie”, made for a fraction of the Dr Strange budget. Remember those posts as you watch Backwards Faces, a debut movie by director/writer/producer/editor/publicist Chris Aresco which somehow wrangles a multiverse movie out of a girl, a gun, a guy and a single room. Shot in black and … Read more
Theatre of Blood
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 21 May Sam Jaffe born, 1901 On this day in 1901, one of the great characters of Hollywood was born, in Harlem, New York. Sam Jaffe, not to be confused with the actor of the same name, dropped out of high school and, thanks to his brother-in-law being a producer, got a job as an office boy at Paramount. He rose quickly and by 22 was production manager on films directed by such luminaries as Lubitsch, Von Sternberg and Mamoulian. Having dated Clara Bow and saved Paramount studios financially by inventing the “night for day” system of shooting – which used … Read more
The Avengers: Series 2, Episode 3 – The Decapod
Just when you thought it was Steed and Gale, Macnee and Blackman, along pops Julie Stevens (later in the decade a regular on the children’s TV show Playaway) as a sidekick in the third episode of series two. What’s afoot? Clearly there were worries behind the scenes before the series got underway and, having lost their big star in Ian Hendry, a double whammy of Macnee and Blackman not quite taking with the viewing public was insured against by drafting in ancillary aid Stevens. As Venus Smith, she plays a nightclub singer helping Steed get to the bottom of a murder after a pretty girl is murdered inside the “Balkan Embassy”. Cypriot, 1960s/70s … Read more
The Reception
The Reception is a film that seems to be heading gloriously in one direction, only to actually be heading disastrously in another. It tells the surely thorny enough story of Jeannette, a rich French-American woman (Pamela Holden Stewart) and her African-American lover Martin (Wayne Lamont Sims), who live in bucolic splendour in upstate New York, where he gains her financial patronage for his career as a (blocked) painter, in return for his companionship and quiescence about her drinking – the few glasses of red per night generally turning into a torrent. Then her daughter Sierra (Maggie Burkwit) turns up with her husband Andrew (Darien Sills-Evans) and the delicate balance is undone. It turns … Read more
Rudo y Cursi
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 16 March The Wanderers FC win first FA Cup, 1872 Today in 1872, the London football club Wanderers won the first football association cup, the oldest football competition in the world. It was the first of three wins of the cup for the club. The FA Cup is a knockout cup open to all football clubs who are established enough, and with facilities enough, to take part. In 1871-72, being the first season of the cup, there was a piecemeal and eccentric series of regulations – Wanderers managed to get to the final having won only one of their four games … Read more
Wer
In any fight for the top slot in the “humanoid monsters of the movies” competition, zombies and vampires fight it out to be number one, while werewolves lope along way behind. It could be worse – the mummies in their tatty bandages get barely any attention and even further down the field are invisible men who are hardly ever seen (geddit?). So maybe the werewolf doesn’t have it too bad, all things considered. At first glance 2013’s Wer appears to be in the business of pushing the fanged, hirsute lycanthrope even further down the pecking order. But first a pre-credits sequence in which a nice French family on a camping holiday are subjected … Read more
This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection
Against the assertion of the title, This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection does look like more like a death than a reanimation, of an individual, a way of life and a group of villagers in Lesotho who are being relocated before their village is flooded to make way for a dam project. It’s an impressive film in pretty much every respect, and it’s entirely understandable why the country decided to submit it for Oscars consideration, something they’ve never done before. This Burial/Resurrection idea is handled almost as a kind of dry joke, since the film’s focus is an old woman who spends the entire film trying to die, after learning of … Read more
Reborn
A horror movie coming at the genre from three different directions, Reborn starts off in distinct tits’n’gore territory, jumps quickly into the supernatural and then eventually morphs into something altogether more psychological. Key asset is Kayleigh Gilbert, who has a big-eyed face and long physique built for the gothic. She plays the teenager who was stillborn as a baby but then got resuscitated in the hospital by a freak burst of electricity. Raised in secret by morgue attendant Ken (Chaz Bono), a creep with a fascination for the breasts of dead women, she eventually escapes aged 16 to track down her mother, faded actress Lena O’Neill (Barbara Crampton), aided by an ability to … Read more
The Spectacular Now
Feeling, looking, sounding like a very dark John Hughes film (Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller period), The Spectacular Now also has in Miles Teller and Shailene Woodley exactly the sort of actors Hughes might have cast – not the prettiest, but the most personable, the most “relatable” as we now say. It’s Teller’s first starring role, after standing out in a series of supporting roles, notably adding a gloss to the comedy 21 & Over that the sub-standard joke writing certainly wasn’t delivering. And at first sight he’s playing a similar kind of character, the bright funny jock. Except this isn’t the successful jock the movies encourage us to pity – because of their muscular … Read more
Kneecap
I’d not heard of Kneecap. The band from Northern Ireland rap in the Irish language, which makes them unusual and worthy alone of a biopic. The fact that they’re good at it and are also buzzy, funny, lairy lads who can act is just a bonus. There are only 80,000 native Irish speakers on the whole island of Ireland, an on-screen info dump tells us, and only 6,000 in Northern Ireland, the bit that remains part of the United Kingdom since Ireland broke away a century ago. So, band members Móglaí Bap (stage name of Naoise Ó Cairealláin), Mo Chara (Liam Óg Ó Hannaidh) and DJ Próvai (JJ Ó Dochartaigh) are a minority … Read more
Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass
So here’s the set-up for Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass. Gail (Zoey Deutch) is a hairdresser in smalltown Kansas who’s been having a conversation with fiancé Tom (Michael Cassidy) about which celebrity each of them would like to have as their celebrity sex partner – a free pass, all just a fun fantasy. Tom has gone for Tilda Swinton. Gail, at Tom’s prompting, has gone for Jon Hamm. All harmless nonsense until the pair of them go to a book signing by Jennifer Aniston, who’s promoting a cookbook full of joyless recipes. Tom decides Aniston might also be a worthy Sex Pass partner and instantly promotes her, dumping Tilda in the process. … Read more
American Star
At last, in American Star, someone has given Ian McShane a lead role in a movie that he can get properly stuck into. Not a fine co-starring role (Sexy Beast) or fine supporting role (John Wick and its sequels) or as a fine co-lead in a spin-off from a TV show (Deadwood) but a bona-fide lead role in a movie that’s all his own. It’s a good movie too. It dips a bit in the last third but ends so powerfully you’ll forgive it. It opens powerfully too. In a stylised, wordless sequence, we follow McShane’s black-clad Wilson as he lands on the island of Fuerteventura, hires a car and drives out into … Read more
