Popular Reviews
The Ascent
Voskhozhdenie, the USSR movie from 1977, usually goes by the English title The Ascent, though The Ascension would be semantically and tonally closer to the mark, since this is a war movie done as an allegory for the passion of Jesus Christ. It’s a “lost patrol” movie. Or, to be strict, a lost patrol of a lost patrol. Larisa Shepitko’s movie starts off among a group of partisans, old folks, sick people and children out in the snow with nothing to eat except the handful of grain they are sharing out among themselves. They are forlorn, adrift, and will soon be dead, unless the two scouts sent out from the group come back … Read more
Farewell Amor
Think of how many films there have been about the Irish immigrant experience in the USA. Or the Italian. Farewell Amor is a real rarity, because it’s looks at that fraught, hopeful new beginning through African eyes. Walter (Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine) is a refugee from Angola who went through the civil war there and is now living in New York, where he drives a cab. He’s been separated from his family for 17 years, but is now finally reunited with them. In fact that’s the first scene of Ekwa Msangi’s film: Walter, his wife Esther (Zainab Jah) and teenage daughter Sylvia (Jayme Lawson) meeting at JFK airport. The look on Sylvia’s face … Read more
Odds Against Tomorrow
There are a lot of ways of approaching 1959’s Odds Against Tomorrow. It’s that sort of film. But let’s be boring and approach it from the usual angle and say it’s the first film noir with a black lead actor in it. It’s Harry Belafonte, whose HarBel company also produced it, and he plays one of three men involved in a bank job. Ed Begley plays the organising force, an ex cop called Burke hoping the job will plug the gap where his pension would have been if he hadn’t been been the fall guy in some police corruption scandal. Robert Ryan is Slater, the ex soldier whose anger issues are partly down … Read more
The Avengers: Series 4, Episode 10 – Dial a Deadly Number
Set in the world of the well-to-do, the very satisfying Dial a Deadly Number first aired in the UK in the early days of December 1965 and returns to two regular Avengers fascinations – businessmen and undertakers. In what sounds like the setup to a joke, there are these three business magnates sitting in a bar, bemoaning movements on the stock market. One of them gets bleeped, by an early manifestation of a pager, and heads back to the office. There is no funny payoff, though, because en route to the boardroom, the bleeped man’s pager gets switched and he is soon dead of a sudden “heart attack” after being struck by some … Read more
A Quiet Place Part II
For a while it looks like A Quiet Place Part II is perversely going to be a prequel story. We’re not in the post-apocalyptic world of the first film, where much of humanity is dead and ghastly monsters are picking off the survivors one by one. Instead we’re at a baseball game, where the pre-disaster Abbott family – Lee (John Krasinski), Evelyn (Emily Blunt), Regan (Millicent Simmonds) and Marcus (Noah Jupe) – are having one of those all-American family days with their friends and neighbours. All is lovely. Until, from the sky, a flaming asteroid, or spacecraft, or something, arrives and within minutes the carnage has started. It’s all by way of a … Read more
Run
Short, bleak and tense, Run is writer/director Scott Graham’s third feature, his third to have a single syllable title and the third to be about a person bridling against a life of limited opportunity. His previous two, Shell and Iona, were about semi-attached women, Run is about a very-married man. Finnie (Mark Stanley) is a big, permanently angry husband and father stuck in a crap job in a fish preparation plant in Fraserburgh (Graham’s home town), north west Scotland. Hating his job, he’s also resentful of his son, Kid (Anders Hayward), who’s just walked off the same job, and painfully resistant to the charms of Katie, his doting wife (Amy Manson). Both Katie … Read more
Benedetta
How funny is Benedetta meant to be? Is it a serious film examining the mindset of religious people of a different time, or a nunsploitation flick straining every sinew to get its stars out of their clothes and comically at it? It’s an adaptation of Judith C Brown’s book, Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Reinaissance Italy. But tellingly, Gerard Soeteman, who worked on the original, never-realised adaptation with director Paul Verhoeven in the 1980s, had his name removed from the credits when he realised which way Verhoeven and new screenwriter David Birke were taking the material for the 2021 version. In bawdy, winkingly vulgar style, not unlike Pasolini’s Canterbury … Read more
Lean On Pete
Lean On Pete isn’t at all like Andrew Haigh’s last film with the word “Pete” in the title. Greek Pete was a biographical mostly-documentary about the life of a London rent boy. It was adult in both senses of the word. Lean On Pete is YA, young adult, the coming-of-age tale of a lonely 15-year-old lad. No sex, no sign of any metropolis, no Brits. Haigh has set out to transform himself entirely as a film-maker and has succeeded entirely. If the whole thing even gets a bit aw shucks now and again, that’s probably also deliberate. His admirably direct approach remains the same, however, as it has been in all his films … Read more
Zola
A nasty-ass neo-noir, Zola is based on the true story of Detroit dancer and waitress A’Ziah King, Zola to her friends. Over 148 tweets written in a clear and vivid prose style she laid out how her new stripper friend Stefani had tricked her into taking a job as a prostitute. Tweet one starts, “Y’all wanna hear a story about why me & this bitch here fell out?” The tweets went viral and the story got picked up by Rolling Stone, who turned it into a feature: Zola Tells All: The Real Story Behind the Greatest Stripper Saga Ever Tweeted. Movie offers followed. At what point James Franco came on board is unclear … Read more
App
App is a film about an app and it originally came with an app. Wha? It’s the first movie to use “second screen technology’ to deliver extra content via smartphone while the main feature plays out on the big screen. “Start the app now” a message (in Dutch) flashes up on the screen as the movie gets underway. App came out in 2013. I watched it in 2022. The accompanying app is no longer available, and even if it were, it probably wouldn’t work on the new operating systems now in use. Nothing dates quite so fast as tech. Movies, on the other hand, have more of a shelf life, and the good … Read more
The Opening of Misty Beethoven
The openings are both figurative and literal in The Opening of Misty Beethoven, the pornified Pygmalion that’s a key movie from the so-called Golden Age of Porn. The real Pygmalion, you’ll recall (and My Fair Lady, the musical version) is about two la-di-dah gentlemen betting on whether they can get a Cockney flower girl to pass as a duchess. Here Henry Higgins, Colonel Pickering and Eliza Dolittle are replaced by Dr Seymour Love (Jamie Gillis), his occasional lover Geraldine Rich (Jacqueline Bedaunt) and Misty Beethoven (Constance Money), a low-rent sex worker whom Dr Love picks up in a grindhouse cinema masturbating a guy dressed as Napoleon. In a plot following Pygmalion’s major beats, … Read more
Le Crime de Monsieur Lange
When talk turns to the greatest films of all time, Jean Renoir is usually in there. And when talk turns to Renoir, it’s La Règle du Jeu or La Grande Illusion which most often figure, with Boudu Saved from Drowning sometimes making an appearance. Le Crime de Monsieur Lange not so much. Made in 1936, the year before La Grande Illusion, it has been eclipsed by it in the decades since, though it’s a virtuoso piece of film-making with a remarkable camera, brilliant performances and a story that goes right against the grain. A man and a woman on the run turn up at a bar near the border begging for a room … Read more
