Popular Reviews
Blood In, Blood Out
Clearly intending to do for Chicanos what Scorsese and Coppola did for Italian Americans, 1993’s Blood In, Blood Out cannot be accused of a lack of ambition. A big, long, zeitgeist-tasting tale of life in and around the gangs inside and outside prison, it follows three East Los Angeles guys on a journey from callow youth to some sort of maturity, each winding up in a place he might not have expected. Miklo, Cruz and Paco are three streetwise Chicanos. Spanish peppers their streetspeak as they swagger around their rough neighbourhood in cartoon exaggerations of masculinity. Cruz is a street artist with ambitions to be something more. Half-brother Paco is a cock of … Read more
Trouble Every Day
The vampire genre gets reinvented every few years. Trouble Every Day is Claire Denis doing it definitively in 2001, a few years before Tomas Alfredson gave it the IKEA flatpack refit with Let the Right One In and Ana Lily Amanpour boldly put an Iranian spin on the whole thing with A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night in 2014. In a sense Denis’s film is the motherlode, because it shows how this most verbose and ornate of genres can be approached from an entirely new angle. Watch Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2013) and tell me he hadn’t watched Trouble Every Day. He’s even repurposed plot elements. Quiet, slow, moody and lacking … Read more
The Human Voice
If you’ve never seen a screen version of Jean Cocteau’s short one-hander The Human Voice before, this one, starring Tilda Swinton and directed by Pedro Almodóvar, is a good place to start. There are plenty of others. Shelby Satterthwaite appeared in a Canadian version in 2019, Rosamund Pike in an adaptation by Patrick Kennedy in 2018. There’s a Spanish language one starring Karina Gidi from 2016, a sung version from 1985 with the soprano Elisabeth Söderström as “the Woman”, even one starring Ingrid Bergman from 1966 directed by Ted Kotcheff (who also gave us Rambo in First Blood, the great Aussie shocker Wake in Fright, and ur-bozo comedy Weekend at Bernie’s). A South … Read more
Bring Her Back
Unsettling, spooky, nasty, demonic and icky, Bring Her Back is a modern horror classic demonstrating brothers Danny and Michael Philippou’s encyclopaedic knowledge of the genre, spun their own way. Their feature debut, 2022’s Talk to Me, was no flash in the pan. It takes a while to work out what’s going on but the brothers give us domestic jeopardy to chew on until all can be revealed. After their father dies unexpectedly in the shower, sibling teenagers – he older than her – are farmed out to a foster carer. Andy (Billy Barratt) is nearly 18 and in three months intends to become his almost blind stepsister’s legal guardian. All he has to … Read more
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
Having paused for 38 years to catch its breath, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice reminds us what we loved about the original 1988 movie… and what we found slightly less than satisfying. 1988 was when some of today’s biggest actors were born – Emma Stone and Glenn Powell for instance. It was the year of Seoul Olympics. And it was around then that Tim Berners-Lee started messing about with a concept that would become the World Wide Web. So, yes, a while ago. Clicking right through back to the present, there’s no sign of Alec Baldwin or Geena Davis in this sequel but a lot of the cast and crew are back – most crucially Michael Keaton … Read more
One-Eyed Jacks
There is a legendary aspect to One-Eyed Jacks. The only film Marlon Brando ever directed, it became notorious because of Brando’s extravagant shooting style – miles of expensive film run through VistaVision cameras to catch the right wave, days waited for the light to be just right and so on. The results were mixed. Brando has undeniably made a fantastic-looking film, and it features the man himself in a lead role when he was still beautiful and pumping pheromones. But it flopped badly on its 1961 debut and never really got another look-in, until the Film Foundation, with Spielberg and Scorsese backing, stumped up the money for a restoration. I watched the Criterion … Read more
Road to Morocco
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 14 October Bing Crosby dies, 1977 On this day in 1977, Bing Crosby died. One of the most forward thinking entertainers of the 20th century, Crosby was one of the first singers to understand that the new system of electrical recording removed the need to sing as if shouting through a loudhailer. Along with stars such as Al Bowlly and Rudy Vallée, he perfected the crooning style, an up close and conversational way of singing, in Bing’s case most often caricatured as “buh buh buh boo”. He was also a pioneer multimedia artist, being hugely successful on record, on the radio … Read more
My First Film
My First Film is not Zia Anger’s first film, and it isn’t a documentary either, which is what it sounds and looks like it’s going to be. Nor is it formidable, which its meta-sounding title suggests it might be. In fact it’s a surprisingly easy and enjoyable watch. Though it does start off in an esoteric direction – “assoteric”, Anger calls it – with a rough collage of staged recollection, old home movie footage and words typewritten on the screen designed to recall meetings Anger had with a production company to direct a film about, more or less, how tough it is being a woman. Something, she eventually realised, she just didn’t want to … Read more
Byzantium
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 26 November Vlad the Impaler becomes ruler of Wallachia for third time, 1476 On this day in 1476, Vlad III, Prince of Wallachia became ruler of Wallachia for the third time. His father, Vlad II, had become a member of the chivalric Order of the Dragon (Drache in German, Dracul in Romanian) in 1431. As the son, Vlad III carried the patronymic Dracula, son of Dracul (he signed himself Wladislaus Dragwlya). Vlad III spent a good deal of his life asserting his claim on Wallachia. He was first installed as a ruler by the Ottomans – Vlad III had been brought … Read more
The Devil Is a Woman
Marlene Dietrich’s favourite of all the films she appeared in was The Devil Is a Woman. Maybe because she’s playing an independent woman beholden to no man. Maybe because she laughs quite a lot in it. The two might not be unrelated. It’s set in Spain, and Dietrich plays Concha Perez, a beauty spotted first on a float at the carnival by dashing gay blade Antonio Galvan (Cesar Romero), who falls for her instantly and badly. Woe betide any man who messes with Concha, Galvan is told by older, wiser Captain Pasqual Costelar (Lionel Atwill), a soldier and stuffed shirt who has already thrown himself on those rocks. And in a protracted flashback … Read more
Parthenope
Parthenope is Paolo Sorrentino vamping, riffing on Paolo Sorrentino. A fabulously good looking film full of defeated old guys and spectacularly hot women, it nods as ever to La Dolce Vita, has a nice cameo for a famous actor, and the grotesques keep coming as if it had somehow accessed Fellini’s dreams. What is it about though? Sorrentino has said it’s not about the Greek version of the Parthenope myth – the siren who lured men onto the rocks. Or the Roman version – the beauty loved by the centaur Vesuvius, who was turned into a volcano by jealous Jupiter while Parthenope herself became a city, the future Naples. And yet it is … Read more
On the Rocks
A Sofia Coppola movie with Bill Murray as an agent of misrule? Lost in Translation II is the guiding principle of On the Rocks, though “stars” Rashida Jones and Marlon Wayans might disagree. First up, we’re served Jones and Wayans hot and then cold – an opening scene shows Laura (Jones) and Dean (Wayans) in love and hot for each other sneaking away from their own wedding party to take a swim in the pool in the hotel basement. Cut to some years later and Dean arrives home late from a work thing, kisses Laura sleepily and then reacts with surprise when she says something. Was he expecting someone else? She was in … Read more
