Popular Reviews
The Departed
Martin Scorsese’s remake of the brilliant 2002 Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs adds 50 minutes of flab to what was a lean, taut thriller. The plot is the same – cop bosses Martin Sheen and Mark Wahlberg send in undercover man Leo DiCaprio to bust a gang. Unbeknown to the boys at the precinct, gang boss Jack Nicholson is one step ahead of them and has been grooming a placeman of his own (Matt Damon) for years, and he’s now deep deep inside their gangbusting team. The drama springs from the “Who is going to get whacked first?” premise as each side works out after a while that there’s a mole on the … Read more
Red Rocket
Red Rocket is the latest news bulletin from Scuzzville USA by Sean Baker, who gave us bitching transexual sex workers in Tangerine (the one “shot on an iPhone”) and the travails of motel-dwelling poor white trash in The Florida Project. Both of those flirted with poverty porn and so does Red Rocket, more literally this time with the story of busted porn star Mikey Saber (Simon Rex), who returns to his Texas hometown to re-ingratiate himself with his his estranged wife Lexi, who lives with her mother in however you designate a dwelling that’s one up from a trailer. Constant background noise, or something big and ugly hovering at the edge of the … Read more
No
Robert LePage directs this exercise in dry wit and history, a French-Canadian comedy of manners cut down from his seven-hour play The Seven Streams of the River Ota. It’s set in Japan at the time of the 1970 Expo, 25 years after the end of WWII. Meanwhile back in Quebec the secession movement is reaching its high water mark and the national government is so rattled it is on the verge of imposing martial law. No is a clever, sophisticated film (and at times in a slightly self-satisfied way) whose title gives us a taste of things to come. No – a pun on the Japanese style of Noh theatre, was also the … Read more
The Naked Gun
Manslaughter mispronounced as “man’s laughter” – by a cop! I laughed, so shoot me with a service pistol. The Naked Gun, back after nearly 30 years and with Liam Neeson now playing Frank Drebin Jr, son of the cop originally played by Leslie Nielsen, is funny. Not, perhaps, as funny as the original, but it made me chortle a few times, groan quite a few more, plus there was a reference to that beaver joke originally cranked out by Nielsen and Priscilla Presley in one of the earlier films. Can any more be necessary? A plot, for instance? No, it’s entirely unnecessary, and the writers – Akiva Schaffer (who directs), Doug Mand and … Read more
Bathory: Countess of Blood
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 20 August Hungary founded by St Stephen, 1000 On this day in 1000, Hungary was established as a country in the Carpathian basin by Stephen I. The area had been settled by semi-nomadic tribes out of the Urals, led by Arpad (c845-c907), and his descendants consolidated their power in the region. Stephen’s father, Géza (grandson of Arpad), had made peace with the Holy Roman Empire and started the process of turning the country Christian. Stephen, once he had dealt with a rival claim to the throne by Koppány, his uncle, continued the process, applying to Pope Sylvester II for the insignia … Read more
Tori and Lokita
Simple and powerful, Tori and Lokita is the latest example of a film by the Dardenne brothers, a film-making duo who these days have to clear a high bar to get real praise, one raised by their own string of good-shading-to-great films. Two Days One Night, The Kid with a Bike, Lorna’s Silence, pick a Dardennes movie and they’re all in essence the same story – fragile people at a moment of crisis. Here it’s mostly African migrant Lokita who’s in the firing line. As the film opens in a simple lock shot, she’s being asked a series of questions by an immigration official in Belgium, who want to know more about her relationship … Read more
The King of Staten Island
The thing to know going into The King of Staten Island, co-written by Judd Apatow, Dave Sirus and Pete Davidson, is that Davidson’s father was a fireman who lost his life in the call of duty (at the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001, in fact). The father of Scott Carlin, the character Davidson plays in this movie, also lost his life in the line of duty, so it’s fair to say there’s probably an autobiographical element in this semi-comic look at a life held in arrested development by family trauma. If you don’t know Davidson, he’s the guy with the slappable face from Saturday Night Live, a slappability put to good … Read more
14 October 2013-10-14
Out this week in the UK Behind the Candelabra (E One, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) Most stars won’t touch an unsympathetic role, for fear of how it will play with their fans. Not so Michael Douglas. Again and again he’s waded in where others fear to tread, playing assholes, psychos and now Liberace, the gayest man in the world, if Steven Soderbergh’s film is to be believed. This is the movie that Hollywood wouldn’t fund, we are told, because of its gay subject. On the evidence of the movie it seems clear they wouldn’t fund it because of the way it portrays the flamboyant pianist – Douglas is majestically reptilian as Liberace and has clearly … Read more
The Echo (El Eco)
Hardscrabble lives are what film-maker Tatiana Huezo specialises in and that’s what she gives us in The Echo (El Eco), a documentary following three families in a Mexican village, particularly the girls just coming of age and contemplating a future of mixed possibilities. A couple of years ago Huezo gave us the excellent Prayers for the Stolen, also set in Mexico, also interested in young women, a documentary-influenced fiction feature with a double shot of drug-cartel thriller to drag us along. Now back with her first love for the last in her so-called “trilogy of pain”, Huezo gives us The Echo‘s key scene early on. Montserrat Hernandez is helping her mother bathe her … Read more
Hangover Square
The film that killed its star, Hangover Square is an adaptation of Patrick Wilson’s most popular novel, a moody noir set in gaslit, foggy London and with a psychoanalytical element that marks it out as a beast lumbering out of the 1940s. There’s a lot to like here but the first thing to grab the attention is the score by Bernard Herrmann, which sets the mood with its jangling tangle of unresolved chords, followed by a giddy, swooping camera swinging us straight into the action – a man being killed done from the killer’s point of view. The killer is George Harvey Bone (Laird Cregar), a classical composer with dissociative identity disorder (multiple … Read more
Elstree 1976
The Kickstarter-funded Elstree 1976 looks like it’s going to be about Star Wars, not least because of the packaging and that being the year that the studio to the north of London was booked out by George Lucas to make his epic space adventure. It is, tangentially, but in fact it’s more a meditation on life and the way its rewards are portioned out. Director/interviewer Jon Spira was born in 1976, which means he’s fanboy generation rather than first-hand participant, but he’s an able interviewer of the ladies and gents who were there. Not the Harrison Fords or Mark Hammils, but the likes of Paul Blake, Laurie Goode, Anthony Forrest and Pam Rose, … Read more
23 September 2013-09-23
Out in the UK This Week Byzantium (StudioCanal/cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) Ah, the burden of being a vampire. It’s been done to death in the movies recently but Neil Jordan is at the helm here and knows how to spice things up. Here he adds a touch of the same mix he used on The Company of Wolves nearly 30 years ago. In other words there’s added social critique, class and gender being the targets of both Jordan and writer Moira Buffini. Saoirse Ronan and Gemma Arterton are the two vampires searching for a new home, the former a Let the Right One In waif, the latter a lusty Hammer horror vamp – both of … Read more
