Popular Reviews
Sami, Joe and I
At the Raindance film festival, London, UK, 27 October–6 November 2021 Swerving the woe-is-me of the issue-driven drama, Sami, Joe and I (Sami, Joe und Ich) takes on the sort of problems teenage girls encounter without becoming a hostage to them and also celebrates the vital force of female friendships without becoming sappy. Quite a feat. We’re in Switzerland, with three 16-year-old girls, all the offspring of migrants, as the summer holidays arrive and the wider world beckons. They’re a fiercely cliquey threesome, high on youth, hyperventilating with optimism, a band of sisters of Three Musketeers camaraderie and feistiness. Writer/director Karin Heberlein doesn’t overdo the “offspring of migrants” bit, but it’s there – … Read more
AI Rising
Seen any good Serbian sci-fi lately? How about AI Rising, a film that works wonders with two main actors, a couple of sets, some clever lighting, moody music and a small team of special-effects artists who know their stuff. If there’s a criticism – let’s get this out of the way straight away – it’s that AI Rising might be straining so hard to be a “proper” sci-fi film on a modest budget that it risks looking like a kid in daddy’s clothes. It’s not an entirely fair charge but it can certainly be levelled. It’s the Pygmalion story, really, done in a faintly Solaris style, with Sebastian Cavazza playing sexist “Yugoslav” (their … Read more
Murder by Death
In Murder by Death Neil Simon proves he’s not always the surefire comedy hotshot, Peter Sellers reminds us that his non-European comedy characters are stinkers and Truman Capote demonstrates, in his only proper acting role, that he’d have made a pretty good Bond villain. It’s a spoof of a country house whodunit, written by Simon, directed by Robert Moore and with a cast that’s pure gold and the saving of this movie demonstrating that if you’re going to kick the legs out from under a genre, you’d better have done your homework. The conceit that Simon has come up with is to collect all the world’s most famous detectives – names slightly changed … Read more
Post Mortem
For a while there was an odd debate going on out there as to whether Post Mortem was or was not Hungary’s first horror movie. On the trivia pages of the IMDb someone claimed that it most definitely was. Since the claim was tucked in among positive reviews from various film festivals, it looked like a case of zealous PR. On the same page, somewhat on its own, was one line stating baldly that Post Mortem isn’t Hungary’s first horror film “even if the creators think it is”. Elsewhere on the same page there’s a claim that that honour should in fact go to a 1996 movie, Legyen világosság (aka Let There Be … Read more
100 Years of… The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Mention The Hunchback of Notre Dame to someone and the response is often a shuffling crouch, accompanied by a moaning “the bells… the bells”, in vague homage to Charles Laughton. Here’s where Laughton got it all from, 1923’s Hunchback, starring Lon Chaney as Quasimodo, the mostly deaf, half-blind unfortunate who falls for a gypsy dancer called Esmeralda, as does nearly every other man in the film. What’s notable watching this version for the first time is how Esmeralda-centric it is. This is her story, not Quasimodo’s. The title of Victor Hugo’s original novel was Notre-Dame de Paris (Our Lady of Paris), and it’s tempting to imagine the title nods towards Esmeralda – she … Read more
The Nest
Suddenly Ingmar Bergman seems to be fashionable again. Just last week I watched Black Bear, a film with a hint of Bergman’s Persona. Now, in The Nest, there’s touches of Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage. Which means that if you’re looking for fireworks, you’ve come to the wrong film. The Nest is a journey into dark psychological territory so muted that it would be easy to miss what’s going on. On the surface things look pretty peachy – Rory O’Hara (Jude Law) is a successful trader who’s moved his family from New York back to the UK, where Rory has used his huge Wall Street bonanza to rent a massive Elizabethan mansion – … Read more
The Avengers: Series 5, Episode 19 – The £50,000 Breakfast
The £50,000 Breakfast is a Cathy Gale-era episode (Death of a Great Dane) originally written by Roger Marshall and then reworked here by Brian Clemens into an Emma Peel-era one. And though it’s tempting to do a compare and contrast – as if to definitively nail the differences between the two eras – that can’t quite be done because Death of a Great Dane really marked the beginning of classic-era Avengers with its mad plots, people with odd names, extras thin (ish) on the ground and a general air of unreality all-pervading. The same opener launches both – a man dies (here it’s a ventriloquist) and his stomach is found to contain a … Read more
After Yang
Philosophical (ie moody) sci-fi movie After Yang picks up on Philip K Dick’s sci-fi reflections on the possibility of consciousness in bots. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, and all that. Dick’s stories tends to arrive on screen dark – Blade Runner, Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly, Minority Report – but director Kogonada decides to go one better than any of those with a film that is almost stygian in its gloom. No matter which way you come at this movie – soundtrack, acting, delivery of speech, clothing, cinematography, framing, screenplay – that doomy, gloomy mood is there. It makes for a meditative experience, if you’re up for something that could also be … Read more
The Messengers
Something weird is going on in the scary house out in the fields of North Dakota, where mom and dad have moved to make one last go of it, growing sunflowers. The kids can see it but the adults can’t. And so on. The Messengers is a bog standard American haunted-house movie with a twist. The twist is not the casting of a long-legged, tight breasted young Kristen Stewart as a heroine, nor the use of a genuine plank (Dylan McDermott) to play her dad. It’s the decision by producer Sam Raimi to get Hong Kong marvels the Pang brothers to direct. Oxide and Danny Pang struck sparks off the horror genre with … Read more
The Looking Glass War
The third of John Le Carré’s spy thrillers to be adapted for the big screen, 1970’s The Looking Glass War is an odd and pretty much entirely unsuccessful spy thriller that’s taken a big conceptual decision only for it not to pay off at all. The first two adaptations were the big success The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (Richard Burton starred) and the underrated The Deadly Game (a reworking of Le Carré’s novel Call for the Dead, with James Mason as a version of George Smiley). There’s no sign of Smiley here, though he was in this film’s original novel. That said, there is some justification for removing him since … Read more
The Avengers: Series 5, Episode 7 – The Living Dead
The zombie movie was sleeping fitfully in its crypt – George Romero would wake it in 1968 with Night of the Living Dead – when The Avengers episode The Living Dead first aired in February 1967. Steed and Peel, it seems, are now ghosthunters as well as murder investigators, industrial-decline consultants and everyday spies, and are called in after stage drunk Kermit (Jack Woolgar), stumbling home one night espies the lid of a tomb opening and a man in white ascending from it. “The Duke!” Kermit exclaims. Was it the first duke, of 17th century vintage? Or one only recently deceased – “a real man”, according to one local – who died in … Read more
Viva
The IMDb plot keywords for Viva include “large breasts” and “limp penis”, a rough indicator of what’s being served up in Anna Biller’s debut, a relentlessly accurate and grim pastiche of the pornified world of the 1970s sexploitation movie, or 1970s society itself. Biller wrote, directed, produced, edited, wrote some of the songs, designed the clothes and sets, painted the paintings, did the animated sequence and even played the organ. She also plays the main character. You could say it’s her film. What a world she’s conjured. Barbi (Biller), a suburban wife who we meet in her bath, tits prominent, smoking, drinking wine and looking pretty morose as she flicks through a magazine. … Read more
