Popular Reviews
Translations
A guy turns up at a young woman’s house unannounced. He’s a photographer who’s been travelling the world. She’s an agoraphobic shut-in cut off from everything. But they have something in common. Two things, in fact. A dead person who they both once knew, in different ways. And feelings for each other, which Evan (Alan Emrys) and Stef (Kate Morgan-Jones) are going to struggle to get into the open. That difficulty – communicating one person to another, translating emotions into words – is really what Translations is all about. It’s a strange film unafraid to head off in its own direction. A simple two-hander for the most part about two old friends (lovers?) catching … Read more
OK Connery
A moving target is harder to hit. That must be why OK Connery goes by so many different titles. The perfectly reasonable Operation Kid Brother is one alternative, the frankly bizarre Divided Evil another. Probably the most informative of all the variants, apart from the original, is Operation Double 007. If I tell you that it stars Sean Connery’s younger brother, Neil, you’ll twig what’s going on here. A mockbuster Bond movie, complete with actors from the franchise. Like Bernard Lee, who played M; Lois Maxwell, of Miss Moneypenny fame; a Bond Girl in the shape of Daniela Bianchi (she was in From Russia with Love); Adolfo Celi (a villain in Thunderball); and … Read more
Cry Macho
Cry Macho is the latest instalment in the Clint Eastwood series of movies you could loosely call the “old guy’s last hurrah”. Like Gran Torino and The Mule, it’s a moment to be reminded of past glories as well as be entertained, all the while marvelling at at Eastwood’s remarkable career and long life. Clint Eastwood was 90 when he was making this film and at an age when many people are being spoonfed, he is starring, directing and producing. He also writes some of the instrumental music. He appears in every scene. Like most late-period Eastwood movies starring the man himself, this is as much about the Eastwood myth behind as well … Read more
20 October 2014-10-20
Out in the UK This Week Two Days, One Night (Artificial Eye, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) A French factory hand (magnificent Marion Cotillard) has a weekend to persuade her colleagues to do without their cash bonuses and keep her on instead. As much a portrait of a woman battling depression and low self-esteem as a condemnation of modern employment norms – what kind of scumbag boss dodges a bullet by making his employees take those sort of decisions? – it has a high concept, a big name in the lead, clear heroes and villains and an “if you try hard enough you can win” throughline. In other words it’s the Dardenne brothers’ most Hollywood film … Read more
The Phoenician Scheme
Symmetrics. Opulence. Screwball comedy pacing. Whimsy. Deadpan. A nostalgic evocation of old Hollywood. The Phoenician Scheme must be a Wes Anderson movie and if nothing else it finally does with Bill Murray what should have been done long ago. It casts him as God. Wes Anderson. By now about 50 per cent of his potential audience have had enough of the tableaux vivants and the mid-century-modern sets and candy colours, the endless digressing, and films that seem longer than they actually are (The French Dispatch and Asteroid City were both only about 1 hour 45 minutes, but felt longer). But fear not, The Phoenician Scheme has pace, it has jokes and it has … Read more
Thirty Two Short Films about Glenn Gould
The title describes it exactly – Thirty Two Short Films about Glenn Gould is 32 short films about the celebrated pianist Glenn Gould, all directed by François Girard, who squeezes his compendium into just over 90 minutes. Which is pretty good going considering he’s covering quite a lot of territory and doing it in a multiplicity of styles. The film came out in 1993, when the cult of Gould was still in full spate. It has since abated a touch, though the Canadian pianist is still the maverick genius to many – a humming cantankerous weirdo to others. Girard takes his cue from the 32 individual pieces in the Goldberg Variations, one of … Read more
Barbie
And so Barbie is born, as a live-action presence, I mean. She’s been in utero one way or another for nearly 40 years, going all the way back to the 1980s and the Cannon Group’s plans to put her on the big screen (shudder). Between there and here there have been many possible outcomes – a possible Amy Schumer Barbie, a possible screenplay by Diablo Cody, Wonder Woman director Patty Jenkins in charge. All of them sound interesting, but in the event it turns out to be Margot Robbie as Barbie and Greta Gerwig directing, with Noah Baumbach in the backroom as co-writer with Gerwig. The stories about a movie’s gestation are often ones … Read more
Family Plot
If you were idly flicking through the TV channels on a wet afternoon and hit upon Family Plot, chances are you wouldn’t immediately think it was a Hitchcock movie – it looks more like an episode of Columbo. That bright TV lighting, those mid-range actors who look like they’re trying not to be fingered as this week’s criminal, one who’s once again not as smart as the man in the mac. I’ve looked up Bruce Dern, Karen Black, Barbara Harris and William Devane and not one of them ever did make an appearance on Columbo but they don’t quite fit the standard Hitchcock bill either, or not the bill containing Cary Grant, Grace Kelly, … Read more
Les Barbouzes
It’s called The Great Spy Chase in English, which captures the caper/shenanigans nature of this French film whose original title is Les Barbouzes. “Barbe” is the French word for beard (hence barber in English), which is what spies in ye olden times were supposed to hide behind, hence the French slang term for them – barbouzes. That all cleared up here we are in 1964 two years on from James Bond’s first screen outing in Dr No and one year on from The Pink Panther, which is closer in spirit to this comedy of bumbling ineptitude – about a French spy on a mission to return a dead arms dealer’s body to his … Read more
Aporia
My dictionary defines “aporia” (from the Greek) as “an irresolvable internal contradiction or internal disjunction in a text, argument or theory”. In sci-fi movies such an internal, irresolvable contradiction – like a man who is his own father – is called a time paradox. Ironically, Aporia, a fascinating attempt to weld one aesthetic to another, bristles with internal disjunctions that are all its own. On one side a familiar, kitchen-sink weepie drama populated with relatable everyday people being put to the test. On the other a machine built by one of them capable of firing “a bullet into the past” to change the course of history. Those people are played by Judy Greer … Read more
Oh, Hi!
When is a good time to tell your girlfriend that you’re just not that into her? Oh, Hi! suggests it probably isn’t when you’re in the middle of a light bondage session and you’re handcuffed to a bed. Yup. Stoopid. That’s the scenario that director Sophie Brooks and star Molly Gordon dreamt up while they were also in something of a handcuff situation – locked down during Covid – and they work it for all its worth in this larky, darkish dramedy at its best when it takes risks. Gordon you may know from being the on/off girlfriend of main man Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) in TV show The Bear. She’s playing a … Read more
The Avengers: Series 2, Episode 5 – Mission to Montreal
Mixing it up yet again, episode five of series two – Mission to Montreal – introduces yet another sidekick in a story set on board a cruise liner heading for Canada. Jon Rollason plays Dr Martin King and brings the number of Steed’s accomplices in this series to three (Honor Blackman and Julie Stevens being the other two). King is an echo of Ian Hendry’s Dr David Keel in that he’s a doctor, and also one only too happy to indulge in a bit of espionage and rough stuff if necessary – not exactly what you’d expect from a well paid follower of Hippocrates, but there you go. In fact he’s more than … Read more
