Popular Reviews
The Hidden Fortress
The Hidden Fortress is a film by Akira Kurosawa and just that fact alone – “a film by Akira Kurosawa” – is enough to get it bracketed as an arthouse movie. Which is entirely ridiculous if you watch it, because there’s nothing difficult or abstruse going on here, no philosophical musing, no challenging style experiments to overcome or difficulties over character, plot or chronology. It’s an out and out Saturday evening adventure movie with action, comedy, a pretty girl and a strapping hero. It’s that aspect of it, its entertainment value, that first attracted George Lucas to it when he was first scoping out his first Star Wars film. Great though Star Wars is, … Read more
Life and Lyrics
Ashley Walters first became well known as Asher D in the London garage/grime outfit So Solid Crew. Since it was a gigantic collective of competing egos two things were on the cards – the band was unlikely to produce enough revenue to support all 19+ members, or it was going to fall apart spectacularly. Either way spelt trouble. Luckily for Walters, he had a second line of work, having been acting even before the band became well known with their single 21 Seconds. Its success got Walters better job offers on TV and he gradually progressed from bit parts to leading roles, usually playing the streetwise London youth you probably didn’t want to be … Read more
23 May 2016-05-23
Out This Week The Revenant (Fox, cert 15) Last year Alejandro González Iñárritu won the Best Picture and Best Director Oscar for Birdman. The gongs have clearly gone slightly to his head and he now thinks he’s Terrence Malick. If there’s one thing this thrilling, frequently brutal and historically fascinating film doesn’t need is slo-mo glides through the awesomeness of its natural beauties – grandiose waterfalls, snowy wastes, virgin forests and the like. But we get them anyway, and if you’re feeling gracious, you might take them as a palate-cleanser between attacks by Indians, bears and the elements as 1820s fur trapper Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio) fights his way from a severe ursine mauling … Read more
2000 Meters to Andriivka
The war in Ukraine cannot end well if 2000 Meters to Andriivka is anything to go by. A bulletin from the frontline during Ukraine’s counter-offensive in 2023, it paints a bleak picture of two countries at war, one of them fighting for its life, the other kicking sand in its face. (As I type in late December 2025 a lousy peace settlement is being hashed out, with the USA apparently urging Ukraine to hand chunks of the country to Russia while Ukraine’s fellow Europeans look on impotently.) The magic in this movie happens mostly in the edit suite, where all the (mostly bodycam) footage from a mission to liberate the Ukrainian village of … Read more
American Perfekt
It’s a good rule of thumb that road movies set out in any American desert and made on a low budget have a knack of turning out OK. There’s often something fairly oddball going on too. Made in 1997, the same year that its star would appear in Tarantino’s career-boosting Jackie Brown, American Perfekt sees Robert Forster playing a psychiatrist driving through the empty desert who stops to pick up a female hitchhiker (Amanda Plummer). She is clearly deranged but no matter how mad she apparently seems, he’s even madder – it’s only thanks to a coin toss that he’s giving her a ride, rather than killing her. Half an hour or so … Read more
100 Years of… Sherlock Jr.
Buster Keaton’s masterpiece Sherlock Jr. wasn’t that successful when it debuted in 1924. Audiences didn’t laugh that much. Critics also didn’t think it was that hilarious – “far and away about the most laughter lacking picture that “Dead Pan” Buster has turned out in a long, long while,” said Variety. Even Buster Keaton seemed rueful about it when later interviewed – “alright but not one of the big ones”. There is something in those verdicts. It isn’t a massively funny film but there is so much conceptual and theoretical brilliance on display here that it doesn’t matter. Variety’s review also reckoned Sherlock Jr. wasn’t a patch on Harold Lloyd. But Keaton here is … Read more
The Letter
Melodramas don’t start much better than 1940’s The Letter. A man fleeing from a bungalow on a balmy evening in Malaya. A woman fires at gun at him. He falls to the ground, obviously dead. She continues firing, not stopping until all the chambers are empty. “He tried to make love to me and I shot him,” the woman explains to her husband later. From the cold way we saw those chambers being emptied, we suspect this is not the entire truth. Nor do we entirely believe that the woman and the dead man barely knew each other. Because the woman’s explanation seems just a touch too blithe and high-handed. And because the … Read more
The Killer
There’s a remake of 1989’s The Killer in the works, with Nathalie Emmanuel and Omar Sy in lead roles. But can it match up to the original, even with original director John Woo calling the shots. I believe it’s Emmanuel as the assassin in the update/reimagining, but it was Chow Yun-Fat way back when, as the supercool killer motivated to do “one last job” to raise enough cash to restore the eyesight of an innocent singer who got caught in the crossfire of a previous hit. Compare and contrast the relative importance of female roles. Blind singer Jennie, played by Sally Yeh, does not do much more than scream and whimper in the … Read more
Hangmen Also Die!
The screamer hanging off the end of Hangmen Also Die! kind of says it all. As if “hangmen” and “die” in the same sentence weren’t enough, the title of Fritz Lang’s 1943 film adds extra emphasis, just in case we hadn’t got it. The scrolling opening prologue continues in much the same vein, informing us that the “thousand year flaming tradition” burning in the hearts of the people of Czechoslovakia was in danger of being extinguished by the Nazis. Czechoslovakia was in fact about 25 years old at the time, having been cobbled together at the end of the First World War (it is now two separate countries again). This insistence is all … Read more
My Man Godfrey
William Powell wouldn’t make screwball comedy My Man Godfrey without Carole Lombard as his co-star. It’s not every actor who insists on getting the ex-wife in to play love scenes (they’d divorced three years earlier) but watching the results you can see why he insisted. It’s an exquisite film, superbly directed and brilliantly written but it’s the acting that is the best thing about it. David Niven and June Allyson would star in a remake in 1957, but good though they are, they stand no chance against Powell and Lombard in full spate in 1936, not to mention the whole rest of the cast. There isn’t a role in this film that isn’t … Read more
Diabolik
What sort of a supervillain has his secret lair in his girlfriend’s back garden? Why not his own turf? While we’re about it, why does Diabolik – the title of the film and the name of its antihero – lift so much of its plot from Fantomas, another European masked villain? If those are the sort of questions you’re asking while watching this film then it probably isn’t working for you. A stew, a pastiche, Diabolik is bits of Bond stirred together with a sliver of The Pink Panther and then spritzed with Italian glamour. We are not here for originality, but for cars and girls, mid-century modernism and split screens, hot women … Read more
Scare Me
There are two interesting things going on in Scare Me, which looks at first glance (and probably deliberately) like a Stephen King-style horror story about a writer having a tough time of it out in a cabin in the woods. Director/writer Josh Ruben also plays struggling writer Fred, here to crank out a horror tale that’s meant to save him from his humdrum job in advertising, though he spends more time doing impressions of Jack Nicholson in The Shining than actually writing. Out for a run the next day, he meets Fanny (Aya Cash) who turns out only to be the hottest writer of horror fiction right now, her book Venus a runaway … Read more
