Popular Reviews
Mad God
The work of a genius though not quite a genius work, Mad God is a crazy phantasmagorical ride into a hellish underworld, a stop-motion encylopaedia of styles, some newly minted, others borrowed, which took 30 years to finally finish by its creator, Phil Tippett. If you don’t know Tippett, he’s an animator who’s won Oscars for both old-school stop-motion work and for computer-generated stuff he did after stop-motion fell out of favour. He was head of animation at Industrial Light and Magic in 1978, aged 27, worked on the original Star Wars movies, Honey I Shrunk the Kids, Robocop and Starship Troopers. It was while working on the original Jurassic Park that he … Read more
The Paperboy
You want Southern Fried? The Paperboy has it for you by the boneless bucketful. Gourmets, look away now. Thanks to the success of Precious (Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire etc), a peculiarly successful misery memoir, for his follow-up its director Lee Daniels is able to call on a cast starry enough to open several films – Zac Efron, Nicole Kidman, Matthew McConaughey, John Cusack. A cast he then submerges in a 1960s Deep South swamp of gators and racial segregation, the spirit of Blanche Dubois invoked by Kidman’s performance as a slut of a certain age who relies on the comfort of whoever happens to be available. What little plot there … Read more
Under the Fig Trees
Under the Fig Trees (Taht alshajra) isn’t a documentary but it’s made by Erige Sehiri almost as if it were. She’s been a documentary-maker up till now, and brings that different quality of storytelling to a quietly brilliant film full of drama. In the realm of fiction stories are told, but in documentaries they emerge – broad generalisation I know – but that’s the way Sehiri does it here. Opening shot: dawn, a young woman somewhere in Tunisia making her way towards a road. Next shot: climbing onto the back of a truck with a bunch of other people, all of whom know each other. Everyone’s in the back, except Fidé (Fide Fdhili), … Read more
Exhibiting Forgiveness
Exhibiting Forgiveness is the sort of film I don’t naturally gravitate towards. It’s about human feelings. It’s heartfelt. It holds out the possibility of positive change in a world stuck in a rut. It’s a Sundance movie. Nothing wrong with Sundance movies but, as an entirely unfair generalisation, they do seem to exhibit a belief that putting emotion out there is interesting in itself, and that the sight of people having earnest conversations, shooting the breeze in a “naturalistic” way, is as dramatic as anything needs to be. So, my stunted emotional hinterland laid bare, to Titus Kaphar’s first feature. He’s a painter who’s now made a film about a painter reconciling with … Read more
Frau im Mond aka Woman in the Moon
Fritz Lang’s scorching run of the late silent era continues with Frau im Mond. Translated variously as Woman in the Moon, Girl in the Moon and By Rocket to the Moon, it’s Lang’s second go at sci-fi. He’d made Metropolis only two years before, nearly bankrupting the Ufa studio in the process. And yet, for some reason, Ufa gave Lang his head again. The fact that Spione (aka Spies), Lang’s creation of the modern spy caper the year before, had been a massive success might have had something to do with Ufa’s readiness to be so generous. Frau im Mond is the realistic, plausible sci-fi to Metropolis‘s poetical, fantastical one, an attempt, using … Read more
Bunny Lake Is Missing
Almost everyone is a sexual pervert in 1965’s Bunny Lake Is Missing, a heady and not entirely coherent psychological thriller with melodramatic tendencies and swivelling eyes to match. Directed by Otto Preminger, a man with a love of the lurid, and with American stars in the lead, it was shot in the UK, away from the chokehold of American puritanism. And what a collection of weirdos Preminger puts on screen as he tells the story of the Lakes, a couple whose daughter disappears on her first day at a sweet and twee school in London’s well heeled Hampstead. At any rate Preminger lets us believe they are a couple, man and wife, until … Read more
17 November 2014-11-17
Out in the UK This Week 22 Jump Street (Sony, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD/digital) Since the undercover cops went to high school first time out, this time they must go to college. Directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller and boss writer Michael Bacall clearly know the Jump Street premise is exhausted. More obviously, they know they spunked their best jokes on the first film. So a good 50 per cent of 22 Jump Street is referential humour about franchise exhaustion, things never being quite so good the second time around, including the outro credits, which push this concept to beyond funny and then back again. The rest of it is jokes about the almost … Read more
Ben Dover: The Sultan of Schwing
Britain’s pornographer-in-chief on the toughest thing about his job, changing attitudes to sex and why all politicians are bastards “M’lud, one of the pornographic tapes in question involved a young lady and a German sausage, a Brat… (leans back) – or was it a Bock…? It was, I believe, a Bockwurst. The lady was in the process, your honour, of committing an unnatural act with a meat appendage.” Ben Dover, real name Simon (though he tells me it’s Lyndsay) Honey, hits the Soho bar we’re meeting in with his motormouth at full throttle and full volume. Now sitting opposite, he’s telling me about his court appearance for supplying porn to some Belgian bloke … Read more
Dekalog
Ten shortish films loosely working their way through the Ten Commandments, director Krzysztof Kieslowśki and co-writer Krzysztof Piesiewicz’s epic Dekalog made its TV debut in December 1989, as Poland was shaking off its Soviet overlords, and was instantly hailed as a masterpiece. Time has polished its legend and it’s still regularly cited as one of the greatest… TV shows or movie collections, take your pick. The whole ten-parter is set in and around one bleak Warsaw tower block, where people come and go, lives are lived and little moral dilemmas play out. In the first one, which lays out the stall, a prescient story about transcendental spirituality and the consciousness (or otherwise) of … Read more
Road House
Road House is a bad movie full of good things – yes, that is the sort of line often trotted out by the terminally indecisive or foolishly fixated when they don’t want to just come right out and condemn something. But in this case it’s true. Why it’s bad first: it’s a film suggesting it’s about one certain person when it’s about another. The several good things: the acting by Ida Lupino and Richard Widmark plus the crackling dialogue. And the cinematography is pretty tasty too. And, before going any further, there is no connection to the Patrick Swayze movie of four decades later, though both stories take place at a road house, … Read more
Unclenching the Fists
Unclenching the Fists could so easily be poverty porn but manages not to be, thanks to an ending offering a sliver of salvation, and a look that’s deliberately trying to avoid the charge that this is just another in a very long series of films using poor people to tell the same story over and over again – it’s tough at the bottom. We’re in Ossetia, one of those regions that were all but subsumed by the old USSR but seem to be having a revival in the post-Communist era. Even so, it’s a poor place, and the town where Kira Kovalenko’s film is set sits in a ravine where it’s hemmed in … 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
