Popular Reviews
Beats
There are two films from 2019 called Beats, both heavily into music. This is the other one – British (Scottish, more specifically) and set in the 1990s world of rave culture. I haven’t seen the American Beats, hip-hop to the core, so can’t say which one comes out on top but Brian Welsh’s Beats sets a high bar. A bit of background. In the 1980 and 90s, ideologically committed to staying out of the economic sphere, the UK government turned its attention instead to policing the population’s behaviour, with new controls on what people could watch (the Video Nasties panic), who they could have sex with (the notorious Section 28 of the innocuous … Read more
Offside
Iranian Jafar Panahi’s comedy is about a group of girls who are arrested for dressing up as boys and trying to get in to see the 2006 World Cup Iran/Bahrain qualifier, women not being allowed to watch football in Iran. Accessing another country’s culture through football is a neat way of curving a ball past those who “don’t do arthouse”. The anti-subtitle crowd might also be interested to learn that the film was shot on the hoof, guerrilla style at the actual game in Tehran, using non-professional actors. Painting a picture of a country that seems at first almost barbaric in its medieval world view, Panahi isn’t so western focused that he can’t … Read more
Erotikon
What else did the director Mauritz Stiller do, apart from discover Greta Garbo and take her to America? Erotikon is one answer, a cult silent movie remarkably triumphing in a genre that usually needs dialogue to succeed. It’s a farce and Stiller gets it up and running in two opening scenes sketching his two main characters. In one corner Leo Charpentier, a professor of entomology who can wax lyrical about the sexual proclivities of the male beetle – how it likes to put it about a bit, in short – without ever realising that the same might apply to a) the female beetle, b) a human subject and c) most pertinently, his wife. We … Read more
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
The Avengers: Series 3, Episode 22 – The Outside-In Man
Whether The Avengers is or isn’t a spy series depends very much on the episode you watch. In The Outside-In Man we’re very much in spy mode, right from the opening scene, in which Steed is seen walking into a butcher’s shop. Then, Man from Uncle style (which was in development when this episode aired in February 1964), he walks from the front of the shop and into the walk-in fridge with the butcher, who immediately drops his Cockney accent to brief him on his job. Butcher/control Quilpie (Ronald Radd) is an M-like figure and has a secretary (Virginia Stride) called Alice but in demeanour and function her name might as well be … Read more
The American Friend
Ever since Alfred Hitchcock adapted Strangers on a Train in 1951, the novels and short stories of Patricia Highsmith have been hotly pursued by film-makers. They have a plot, thrills, seedy glamour, black humour and the suggestion of transgressive sex, any element of which can be dialled up and down. As I write there have been approaching 40 film and TV adaptations, quite a few of which are famous – Hitchcock’s, of course, Plein Soleil (starring Alain Delon), Carol (Cate Blanchett) and The Talented Mr Ripley (Matt Damon and Jude Law). The American Friend (aka Der amerikanishe Freund) not so much. In the mid 1970s director Wim Wenders had plans to do a … Read more
Casino Royale
You only live twice, or so they say. Casino Royale is the old Bond song incarnate. Because we have been here before. Not titularly – though we have, in the 1967 spoof made by a gaggle of writers and directors (John Huston, Billy Wilder, Woody Allen and Joseph Heller among them) who must have been high. Tonally, I mean. After A View to a Kill, Roger Moore’s last Bond and a bad performer at the box office, moves were made to zhuzh up the increasingly tired formula. In came Timothy Dalton, out went the eyebrow, and for a couple of films, which in retrospect, look better and better, there was a return to … Read more
Killers of the Flower Moon
It turns out that one of the many uses of Killers of the Flower Moon is as a film for baby-friendly screenings. My daughter-in-law takes her new son to these on Tuesday mornings and recently reported back that the great thing about Martin Scorsese’s latest is that she could take the baby out of the auditorium to be changed or fed and then go back into the screening some time later and not really have missed much. There’s quite a lot of redundancy, in other words. It may be stylish redundancy delivered by a director fully confident of what he’s doing but you could easily cut half an hour from this film and … Read more
Minari
Minari is an old-school film of the sort you used to see at Sundance a lot, gentle character driven dramas full of people who were essentially decent. The sort of film Robert Redford used to direct, like Ordinary People or The Milagro Bean Field War or A River Runs Through It (which starred Brad Pitt, an exec producer here). It did well there, winning both the Grand Jury and Audience awards. In the dying days of the Donald Trump administration it asks and answers the question: who built America? The answer is immigrants, though that message is never uttered out loud. Instead we follow a Korean family who’ve moved out from the city … Read more
Napoleon
With Ridley Scott’s Napoleon thundering over the horizon on horseback, time to haul out a movie Scott and his star Joaquin Phoenix have clearly feasted on, 1927’s historic and historical behemoth, Napoleon, aka Napoléon vu par Abel Gance (ie “as seen by Abel Gance”). Adored by Coppola, derided by Kubrick, who thought it “really terrible” though technically a masterpiece, the movie clearly divides opinion but is required viewing by anyone with an interest in the Corsican general who conquered Europe or the silent films of a century ago. Whatever you think of it, you’ll get a dry laugh from reading the one-line synopsis on the IMDb – “A film about the French general’s … Read more
Watcher
Watcher stars Maika Monroe as a woman who’s arrived in Bucharest with her husband (Karl Glusman) and who is soon convinced that the guy living in the depressing Communist-era block opposite is watching her from his window, behind a filthy net curtain. There’s also a killer on the loose, one who preys on young women and who likes to cut off their heads. It’s making Julia (Monroe) anxious, and her anxiety is amplified by the fact that she can’t speak the lingo – though she’s trying – and her husband isn’t being quite the rock she’d hoped. He’s out at work all day, leaving her to stew. And when she starts voices her concerns … Read more
Benediction
Terence Davies struggled to raise the finance for Benediction, as he does so often with his films. There’s no multiplex demand for Emily Dickinson (subject of his last feature, 2016’s A Quiet Passion) or Edith Wharton (2000’s The House of Mirth), he’s told, and in any case the uncompromising Davies isn’t the sort of writer/director to meet audiences halfway with explication-heavy dialogue. Producers and money men take fright. And yet, every time a new Davies movie does finally make it to the screen, it turns out that there is an audience for it, the people who have some idea who this modernist poet was, or that infamous writer, or want to know more. … Read more
