Popular Reviews
Tango aka Tango, no me dejes nunca
Carlos Saura’s Tango, from 1998, is a backstage musical with a techy overlay and a political undertow. It’s meta this, that and the other, which distracts from the simplicity of what’s on offer to some extent. Which is… an old-fashioned Fred Astaire-style musical. Nothing wrong with a Fred Astaire musical, as long as the dancing is filmed properly, which it is. Miguel Ángel Solá stars, as the injured director licking his wounds after a recent car accident and relationship break-up with his star dancer, Laura Fuentes (Cecilia Narova). Mario Suárez is now putting together a new show, one that he wants to do his way – political, challenging, artistic – though the money men are trying … Read more
I Care a Lot
You used to see plenty of films like I Care a Lot in 1990s. In the slipstream of Quentin Tarantino’s first burst of success there was a glut of movies with a “who’s zooming who” plot playing out in an “only in the movies” universe of smart talk, skull-cracking violence, hot women, cool men, gunplay and cars. Joe Carnahan – one of the best of the bunch of writer/directors working the territory – summed it up well in the title of his 1998 debut, Blood, Guts, Bullets and Octane. There was a real sense of writers and directors having a lot of fun. Sometimes more than the audience. I Care a Lot’s writer/director … Read more
I Eat Your Skin
What is it Tarantino says, about all movies being interesting even if they’re not all good? I Eat Your Skin is a case in point. Not great but absolutely fascinating, it started life in 1964, when it went by the title Zombies, gaining the name it’s now stuck with when a distributor was looking for a companion movie to make up a double bill in 1971. Director/writer/producer Del Tenney had just the film to go with I Drink Your Blood, he said. And so, taking Zombies (aka Zombie Bloodbath aka Voodoo Blood Bath) off the shelf where it had sat for seven years, he gave it yet another new name and some refreshed … Read more
Penda’s Fen
As far as the work of director Alan Clarke goes, Penda’s Fen is an outlier. A strange take on folk horror, it’s become something of a cult in the decades since it was first broadcast in 1974 in the BBC’s long-running Play for Today strand. Pre HBO and streaming, TV was predominantly a writer’s medium rather than a director’s. Even so, Clarke made a name for himself as a director in TV for two reasons: his focus on often punishingly gritty social-realist subject matter and his eye for talent. Prime (though relatively late) examples of this include TV features like 1979’s Scum, set inside a young offenders prison, where he gave Ray Winstone … Read more
Big Deal on Madonna Street
Working a gag a thousand times and in a thousand different ways, Big Deal on Madonna Street, aka Persons Unknown (a translation of its Italian title, I Soliti Ignoti) pours good-natured scorn all over the heist movie. The heist movie traditionally goes like this – a target is identified, a team is assembled and a plot is meticulously masterminded, there’s a dry run and then, finally, in the film’s big centrepiece, the heist itself, which goes like clockwork, apart from one tiny moment, when something freakish happens – a screwdriver slips, a guard varies his routine – and the entire operation is suddenly hanging by a thread. Writers Agenore Incrocci and Furio Scarpelli (known … Read more
Desperate
Anthony Mann called Desperate his first proper movie, the one where he got to do what he wanted to do. Mann, now so famous for his westerns, had previously proved himself a master of film noir, as Desperate proves. This was the first of seven he’d crank out in 1947 and 1948. It’s a good work rate, but then these were made hot and fast. If it was me I’d have put director George Diskant’s name on the movie as its star. His cinematography is majestic. He was known for deep focus and his mastery of contrast – plenty of both here. But things being how they are it’s Steve Brodie’s name at … Read more
September 5
Cool rather than hot, and about events not as they happened but as they were reported, September 5 is the story behind the story, of how a sports team from ABC TV found themselves at the cutting edge of a major news event at the 1972 Olympics, when a group of Israeli athletes were taken hostage by a terrorist group, Black September, as 900 million viewers around the globe looked on. Mark Spitz winning seven swimming Gold medals, Olga Korbut performing her Dead Loop on the asymmetric bars, Munich is remembered for many things, but probably most of all for the moment when the German Olympic authorities’ attempt to perform a hard reset … Read more
Asylum
There are two films called Asylum from 1972. One is typical of its era – a compendium horror produced by the Amicus studio, directed by Hammer regular Roy Ward Baker, written by Robert Bloch, of Psycho fame, and starring Peter Cushing. And so is the other, a fly-on-the-wall documentary taking seriously a countercultural moment at full flood. This is a review of the latter, just to disappoint the lovers of the lurid, a sober look inside a therapeutic community based in a small house in the East End of London, run by Dr RD Laing and his fellows in the Philadelphia Association, where clinicians and patients interacted together in a community in what … Read more
The 400 Blows
The 400 Blows is a monster classic of the French New Wave with a meaningless title, a literal translation of the original French Les 400 cents coups. “Raising hell” would be a more idiomatic way of putting it and the original US subtitler even suggested Wild Oats. But the distributor preferred to stick with the literal and more enigmatic (in English anyway) translation. The Wild Oats being sown, the Hell being raised, the 400 Blows being struck are by the central character, Antoine (Jean-Pierre Léaud) modelled on director/writer François Truffaut himself, a kid kicking against the pricks at home, at school, getting into trouble with the law, playing hooky to go to the … Read more
One of Them Days
The inspiration for One of Them Days is the black cinema of the late 1990s, a period when actors like Taye Diggs and Gabrielle Union, Nia Long and Omar Epps were on early career highs. Though Dude Where’s My Car?, as white-sliced as it comes, might also be in the mix. That was a tale of two white teenage dudes having the day from hell, and One of Them Days does something similar with its story about a pair of young black women who suddenly need to raise a large sum of money or else be evicted from their fairly skanky apartment in a block called The Jungle. Unsurprisingly, given its name, The … Read more
The Gigolos
The first feature by TV director Richard Bracewell lifts the stone on male gigolos in Money London, avoiding cliché to deliver a jagged yet humorous portrait of male/male rather than male/female relations. In seemingly aimless, freeform style we follow Sacha and Trevor, as they drop into one pre-arranged hook-up after another. Sacha is the gigolo, Trevor his aide. The cast is interesting and for two different reasons. For starters we have Sacha and Trevor, who are played by Sacha Tarter and Trevor Sather, the guys who wrote the film along with Bracewell, though much if not all of their dialogue is improvised. Next to these relative unknowns are their female clients, played by … Read more
Gentlemen of Fortune
You might not associate frivolous caper comedy with the dour Soviet Union of gulags and five-year plans, but that’s what Gentlemen of Fortune is. A larky affair that probably works best if you get all the cultural specifics, it’s perfectly entertaining even with very little knowledge of the USSR. It’s one of the most successful comedies ever produced under the communist system – doesn’t that tickle your curiosity? It’s a very familiar story, of one man posing as another, kicking off with the theft from an archaeological dig of a solid gold helmet reputed to have belonged to Alexander the Great. The thieves are soon caught and sentenced to prison, but where’s the … Read more
