Popular Reviews
Shadow Dancer
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 19 July IRA declare ceasefire, 1997 On this day in 1997, the Provisional Irish Republican Army declared that hostilities with Britain were over. It had come into being, in its modern form, in 1969 after increasing unrest over campaigns for more civil rights for Catholics had resulted in the mass deployment of the British Army in Northern Ireland. There had been several ceasefires before, most recently in 1994 when secret talks between the IRA and the British government had led to negotiations about proper talks to secure a settlement. When the British government announced that it wouldn’t go into talks with … Read more
Fuze
Fuze adds another little gem of a film to under-regarded director David Mackenzie’s list, joining Starred Up, Perfect Sense, Relay, Spread and Hell and High Water as unusual takes on genre, often with a heavily procedural slant. Things click, click, click into place in Mackenzie films, though often the tumblers line up in unexpected ways. Here, what looks like one sort of film quickly becomes another and then another. But things starts off in familiar territory, in the Paddington area of London, where a huge unexploded bomb has been exposed during the preparatory work for a new development. In come the bomb disposal guys, an army team led by the bluff, sweary Major … Read more
Walk a Tightrope
Walk a Tightrope, a British B movie from 1964 packs more of a punch than you might expect, thanks to a properly ingenious story and a great performance by Dan Duryea, who adds the all-important element for British B movies of the era, a starring role for a second-string American actor at the tail end of his career. Duryea was 57 when this was made and looks older. Often cast as a villain, this “heel with sex appeal” (as the New York Times called him in his obituary) would be dead of cancer within four years and looks gaunt here, so maybe it was already taking its toll on his health. His appearance … Read more
Let Sleeping Corpses Lie
A cult Spanish zombie film shot mostly in England’s Peak District in 1974 – those filters must surely narrow things down to Let Sleeping Corpses Lie, which also goes by the name of The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue, the slightly more anaemic Don’t Open the Window and the original Spanish title, No Profanar el Sueño de los Muertos. The Living Dead bit nods us towards George Romero. But Jorge Grau’s film is full of his own little touches, and has fantastic mood and chilling music to offset some of the madder moments of bad acting (though a lot of those can be laid at the door of bad dubbing). Plotwise, a man … Read more
25 January 2016-01-26
Out This Week Macbeth (StudioCanal, cert 15) Director Justin Kurzel must have hired every smoke machine in the UK for this adaptation of “the Scottish play” about a warlike laird driven crazy, either by his own ambition or by supernatural forces. But the relentless visual effects, dark, swirling lighting and fabulous performances by Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard – as the high-born couple hoping to go just that little bit higher – aren’t the best thing about the film. That’s the superb filleting job that Todd Luiso, Jacob Koskoff and Michael Lesslie have done on Shakespeare’s original play, which has had many obscure references removed and has done away with any language that … Read more
Vesper
Ambitious sci-fi from Lithuania – but in English, before you switch off – Vesper is all about the world-building and the genre-tasting. One minute a coming-of-ager, another a love story, yet another a quest movie, its overriding vibe is the eco-apocalyptic thriller, set in a doomy world after the collapse of civilisation, where humans fight each other and an aggressive ecology for supremacy. Vesper Chronicles, the on-screen title actually proclaims, as if this were going to be the first of a series of movies. There is a Young Adult, almost Hunger Games aspect in its focus on a rugged young woman as its central figure. Vesper (Raffiella Chapman) lives out in a blasted … Read more
How I Ended This Summer
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 7 May Vladimir Putin becomes Russian president, 2000 On this day in 2000, former KGB lieutenant Vladimir Putin was elected President of Russia. He had resigned from the KGB on the second day of the attempted KGB coup against Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in August 1991 – “I immediately decided which side I was on” he later said. From there he went into an administrative career working for the Saint Petersburg mayor’s office, where he was responsible for organising foreign investment. In 1996 he moved to Moscow, where he became responsible for transferring the former assets of the Soviet Union to … Read more
Panic Button
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 2 May Maiden flight of the world’s first passenger jet, 1952 On this day in 1952, the de Havilland DH 106 Comet was introduced into service by BOAC airlines. It was the world’s first commercial jet and its clean lines, big square windows, relatively quiet cabin and comfortable interior meant it looked like it was going to be a success. However, things did not start auspiciously for the plane. Several Comets had to abort take-off as they were taxiing down the runway. Over the next year, three in-air catastrophes occurred, with planes falling apart in mid-air. It was discovered that the … Read more
X
Impressive in every role she’s been in since her movie debut in 2015’s The Survivalist, Mia Goth has been a star in waiting for a while now. While X isn’t every young woman’s idea of getting your name in lights – the nudity, the blood, the screaming – Goth seizes it with both hands. Appropriately, to some extent it’s a story about fame as well – Goth plays Maxine, a young dancer at a burlesque strip joint who heads off into the backwoods to shoot a porn movie with a bunch of other people. All of them will soon, they’re certain, be hitting the big time once the world gets a load of … Read more
Agon
As a title Agon is a bit esoteric. The root word from which English gets “agonist”, “protagonist” and so on, it’s also the source of the word “agony”. But to the Ancient Greeks the Agon was also an athletics competition. Director Giulio Bertelli’s choice of titles may be abstruse but it is apt – his film is about the struggles of three female athletes as they compete in the entirely fictional 2024 Olympic Games at Ludoj. While we’re in the realm of etymology, “Ludoj”, the linguists will know, is the Esperanto word for “Games”. The three leads are almost fictional too. Two of them, Yile Yara Vianello and Sofija Zobina, are professional actors … Read more
Primer
Primer is the mumblecore sci-fi movie par excellence, if you can use a high-falutin term like par excellence with a film-making ethos as meat and potatoes as mumblecore. The writer and director Rian Johnson reckons it’s the best time travel movie ever made, and when he was sketching out ideas for Looper sent them to Shane Carruth, Primer’s writer/director/star/composer/producer/editor/production designer/sound designer (and probably a few more roles besides). Carruth reckoned Johnson had got his time paradoxes and causalities all wrong, which he may well have done. Looper is fairly hard to follow in terms of what happened to which version of a certain person in which timescape, but Primer ties Looper’s comparatively simplistic … Read more
Yes, God, Yes
Yes, God, Yes – a funny title pithily catching the twin obsessions of this slight but sharp movie. Sex and god. It stars Natalia Dyer, who somehow has managed to fit this in alongside the nine other movies and 30-odd episodes of the Netflix show Stranger Things she’s appeared in over the last six years or so. She was about 24 when she made this, but the big eyes and slender frame mean she can just about get away with playing Alice, a teenager from a sheltered background grappling with the first stirrings of sexuality at the Catholic school that seems almost unnaturally fixated on the carnal. Coming of agers with storylines that … Read more
