Popular Reviews
The War with Grandpa
In 2016 Robert De Niro starred in Dirty Grandpa, as the titular disgusting (in lots of ways, but mostly sexually) senior giving uptight grandson Zac Efron lessons in letting it all hang out. It was a funny film, though a 5.9 rating on the imdb (as I type) suggests that not everyone loved it. I didn’t love it either, but a few good gags and a suggestion that even the oldies like to part-ay is, in these frigid times, enough for me. The War with Grandpa was made one year later and then sat on a shelf for three more, thanks to the Harvey Weinstein scandal (the Weinsteins were set to distribute it). … Read more
My Thoughts Are Silent
My Thoughts Are Silent (Moyi dumky tykhi, in the original Ukrainian) is one of a small clutch of films about or featuring a sound recordist, sitting alongside the likes of Silence (from Ireland), Upstream Color (USA) and Berberian Sound Studio (UK). All are odd and left-field in different ways, with My Thoughts Are Silent the most deliberately comedic. Which is not quite the same thing as “funny” though it does have its moments. There’s a black and white prologue before the film proper gets going, set in Hungary in 1526, where some priest is trying to flog a “holy relic” to two priests. “A foreskin?” asks one of the clerics hopefully. It turns … Read more
Things Will Be Different
Michael Felker’s debut movie, Things Will Be Different, is billed as “A Felker Film”, which is ominously grandiose. But things are indeed different here and Felker emerges as a writer/director you might term an auteur, which is what the whole Felker Film thing is suggesting, right? Most movies don’t operate like Felker’s film. They set out a proposition and then work their way through it for us. Here, Felker drops us into something and makes us do the mental lifting for ourselves. After introducing us to two people at a remote diner, both with rifles, both looking hunted, he essentially asks us to ask a whole bunch of questions. Who are these people … Read more
5 October 2015-10-05
Out This Week Tomorrowland (Disney, cert 12) When did we give up on believing in the future? Can we believe again? Writer Damon Lindelof sets out to tackle the turn to postmodernism – the most significant philosophical cultural shift in the West for a century – in a big, multiplex popcorn film. George Clooney plays a character who is postmodernity incarnate. When Frank was an eager, inventive little boy he went to the 1964 New York World’s Fair (the high point of modernity and its showcase event) and met a young girl called Athena, was wowed both by her and by the scientific marvels he saw there. Then was wowed some more when … Read more
The Serpent’s Kiss
A treatise on order and chaos, propriety and lust, hidden inside the convoluted, if a bit TV-ish, story of Meneer Chrome (Ewan McGregor), an 18th-century Dutch (or is he?) landscape gardener. Chrome has been employed to refashion and tame the herbaceous borders of bumptious self-made Thomas Smithers (Pete Postlethwaite) and in the process bankrupt him and seize his bride (Greta Scacchi), if the plans of dastardly fop James Fitzmaurice (Richard E. Grant) bear fruit. This lace-cuffed fol-de-rol of a Sunday afternoon movie is the directorial debut of Oscar-winning cameraman Philippe Rousselot and it doesn’t suffer from bad looks. It also has its odd sly, dry moment – though there are only so many times … Read more
The Avengers: Series 4, Episode 17 – The Girl from Auntie
The Girl from Auntie this episode is called, a nod to The Man from Uncle, which had debuted about six months earlier on US TV and become an instant hit with its sexy spies, gadgets, 007 goofery and strong sense of the ridiculous, having clearly drunk from the same well as The Avengers. All that said, sadly this is not a great episode, though it is stuffed with good things. It’s also not particularly heavy on Emma Peel, who was perhaps off talking to the Bond people – Honor Blackman’s Pussy Galore having made waves – or just enjoying a bit of a break when the episode was in production. She turns up in … Read more
McCabe & Mrs. Miller
The superb McCabe and Mrs Miller (generally styled McCabe & Mrs. Miller) was sold as a revisionist western when it came out in 1971. Its director, Robert Altman, went so far as to call it an “anti-western”. Even though Anthony Mann in the 1950s and Sergio Leone in the 1960s had paved the way with “revisionist” westerns of their own, the first reviews of Altman’s version of the revisionist western were harsh. Rex Reed of the New York Daily News called it, “an incoherent, amateurish, simple-minded, boring and totally worthless piece of garbage”, which is nailing your colours to the mast if nothing else. Other critics liked, loved and raved over it. Pauline … Read more
Winter Sleepers
In 1997’s Winter Sleepers (Winterschläfer) German director Tom Tykwer warms up the engines for his breakthrough hit, 1998’s Run Lola Run. There are fewer tricks here, not as much visual pizzazz, the fourth wall remains unbroken, and yet Tykwer is clearly up to something as he spins out a tale of two different couples, one whose relationship is in the hot flush of urgent sexual need, while the other two at the outset don’t know each other at all. On the one hand a blond pair who seem bright and charming and a dark pair whose standoffishness looks like it might be dooming them to a life at one remove from the action. … Read more
Sibyl
Billed as a drama, Sibyl is in fact a tragic comedy, a brilliantly dry and pitiless one, Kafkaesque in its analysis of a person in self denial and also Kafkaesque in being almost opaque until that “ah-haa!” moment comes along. Director and co-writer Justine Triet, a fan of Hitchcock and Polanski, dives right in. Even before the opening credits we’ve met Sibyl, a shrink and former novelist who now wants to get back in the writing game. “Don’t do it,” boiled down, is the advice she gets from an old editor friend. But Sibyl does it anyway. Sibyl (Virginie Efira) is also a recovering alcoholic who really shouldn’t have another drink, and certainly … Read more
Beyond the Forest
“Nobody’s as good as Bette when she’s bad!” screamed the posters for this 1949 melodrama starring, of course, Bette Davis. But bad how? The latest of a run of flops for Davis when it was released, Beyond the Forest allowed Jack Warner to offload the star who’d made him fistfuls of money for 18 years. Good riddance to you too, said Bette, who’d wanted out anyway. Or so she said. It’s a madly overcooked affair from the outset, with a rolling written introduction after the opening credits insisting that this is a grim but necessary portrait of evil and its rewards and ending with a metaphor about a “scorpion in a mad fury” … Read more
Something from Nothing: The Art of Rap
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 10 February Kanye West releases debut album, 2004 On this day in 2004, multi-instrumentalist, singer and rapper Kanye West released his debut album, The College Dropout, which is precisely what West was, having junked art school after one semester in favour of a career in music. The career in music went well, with West rapidly becoming a sought-after producer – Alicia Keys, Jay-Z, Ludacris – and beatmaker, all the while working on his own solo album, whose release got pushed further and further into the future as West spent his time making music for other people. His sample-based singles Through the … Read more
Lacombe Lucien
En route to winning the Nobel prize for literature in 2014, Patrick Modiano co-wrote Lacombe Lucien with Louis Malle, not only a pitiless study of sociopathic human behaviour but a rebuttal of the dearly held notion in France that amost everyone during the Second World War was in the Resistance. It did not go down well with French critics when it came out in 1974, who saw Modiano and Malle’s portrait of young Lucien Lacombe for what it was – a barely coded indictment of the motherland. It’s massively immersive, as no one ever said back then, and invites audiences to slip into its world as if into a great novel. Against a … Read more
