Popular Reviews
The Old Guard
Dark hair, dark shades, dark clothes, it’s Badass Charlize Theron who turns out for The Old Guard, a superhero adventure with a mournful air and an eye on a franchise. There are four distinct Therons – the actor (Monster, In the Valley of Elah), the babe (Gringo, The Devil’s Advocate), the snark (Young Adult, Tully) and the buttkicker (Aeon Flux, Atomic Blonde). She’s good at them all but it’s the last in that list that we get here. Though at 45 Charlize isn’t bouncing out of the helicopters the way she once did. But if Tom Cruise can do it… and he’s 13 years older. Theron plays androgynously named “Andy”, head of what looks … Read more
Les Visiteurs du Soir
Because Marcel Carné made Les Visiteurs du Soir in Nazi-occupied France, and because it’s about a realm invaded by the The Devil’s Envoys (the English title), it’s often seen as allegorical. Carné denied it to the end of his life. But his film works perfectly well as an allegory as long as you stop there – the invasion bit. Go any further and the comparison will not hold. Set in a 15th-century France of doublet and hose and conical hats, it follows a couple of the devil’s representatives, who have been sent to Earth disguised as minstrels to create mayhem. Dominique (Arletty) and Gilles (Alain Cluny) arrive at the court of Baron Hugues … Read more
A Little Prayer
Writer/director Angus MacLachlan has built a career mapping the dynamics of functional and dysfunctional families. A Little Prayer slots neatly in alongside earlier films such as 2014’s Goodbye to All That and 2017’s Abundant Acreage Available. You could add his stage play The Dead Eye Boy to the list. I’ve not seen any of them but having now seen A Little Prayer I’d be interested in having a look, because MacLachlan has made an interesting drama in a genre I don’t generally have much time for. We’re in smalltown America where the tightly knit family of Bill (David Strathairn) and Venida (Celia Weston) is having a moment. Their son, David (Will Pullen) and … Read more
The Avengers: Series 2, Episode 21 – The White Dwarf
A top astronomer dies before the opening credits in The White Dwarf, the 21st episode broadcast in series 2 of The Avengers. Turns out that a large astral body might be heading towards Earth and we’re all toast if it does in fact arrive. And Professor Richter was the only man who knew absolutely for sure whether it was coming this way. Who would want such a man dead? It’s a good sci-fi premise which sees The Avengers edging further into the world they would eventually dominate – the esoteric. And off we go to a science facility in Cornwall, Mrs Gale undercover as usual, as Dr Gale, checking into the local small … Read more
Laura
A complex psychological thriller masquerading as a film noir, 1944’s Laura is about three men who are bewitched by a woman so ethereally, transcendentally beguiling that it is entirely appropriate that, when director Otto Preminger takes the curtain up, Laura (Gene Tierney) is already dead. What follows is a basic whodunit pulled in various unusual directions. A for-instance: the cop on the case, Detective McPherson (Dana Andrews), invites one of the men suspected of killing her, Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb), to accompany him while he cross-examines other witnesses. What cop does that? Another: the cop doesn’t do very much actual investigating and instead spends an inordinate amount of time in the dead woman’s … Read more
You Only Live Once
Fritz Lang’s second Hollywood picture, You Only Live Once, was released in 1937, three years after the death of Bonnie and Clyde, and was the first movie to tell their story – sort of. A tale of bad luck and trouble rather than one of bad people doing bad things, it stars Henry Fonda and Sylvia Sidney as a couple in love – she a sweet girl who works for the Public Defender, he a threetime jailbird determined to go straight and make an honest woman of his wife-to-be but finding that society won’t give this sucker an even break. Blocked at every turn, Eddie (as Clyde is called here) turns back to … Read more
Mad Doctor of Blood Island
There’s no point pretending that Mad Doctor of Blood Island is any good. It isn’t. It has its moments but on the whole it’s a waste of time unless you watch it as it was meant to be watched – in the car at a drive-in playing tonsil hockey with whoever. The Filipino grind-em-out production house Hemisphere Pictures as good as tells us this in a short preamble before the film proper gets going. Here – against a backdrop of teenage couples wrestling in an approximation of cinemagoers making out – an overly serious voice implores audience members to repeat an oath while drinking the green serum that’s thoughtfully been provided for them … Read more
Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man
For decades Cohen’s music has been misrepresented as the soundtrack to suicide. In fact the old (now 73) groaner is something of a comedian, though his wit is so dry it’s taken non-aficionados decades to catch on. He’s also something of a master of self-mythology, the sort of performer who seems to back into the spotlight rather than seek it out. His albums have titles such as Songs of Leonard Cohen (1967), Songs from a Room (1969) and Recent Songs (2001), this austerity matched in real life by his decision to become a Buddhist and the subsequent five years he spent in seclusion from 1994 to 1999. In fact Cohen’s recent higher profile … Read more
Tony Manero
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 16 October Former Chilean president Pinochet arrested, 1998 On this day in 1998, Augusto Pinochet, the former president of Chile, was arrested in London, having been indicted by a Spanish judge of crimes against the human rights of his countrymen. It was the first time that European judges had applied the principle of universal jurisdiction, which asserts that states or international organisations can lay claim to legal authority over somebody, regardless of where the crime took place. The most notable use of the principle to date was in the trial of Nazis at the Nuremberg Trials after the Second World War, many … Read more
The Girl with the Needle
Imagine reading Oliver Twist and suddenly Jack the Ripper turns up in it. The Girl with the Needle (Pigen med nålen in the original Danish) is a bit like that. A bracingly miserablist trek through the life of one of the urban poor in post-First World War Denmark, its Dickensian traipse from one grim situation to the next is interrupted towards the end with the dawning realisation that its heroine, poor benighted Karoline, has somehow wandered into the orbit of Dagmar Overby, Denmark’s most prolific serial killer. The film never tells us that the Dagmar on screen is Overby but the woman portrayed is presented as a serial murderer of infant children, which … Read more
Liliom
“I almost like Liliom best of all,” Fritz Lang said in 1974 about the film he’d directed 40 years earlier. This from a director who invented whole genres (like the spy thriller), directed massive epics (Metropolis) and went on to dominate the crime drama with films like The Big Heat. Lang’s entirely atypical film about the poetic side of wife-beating is quite a surprise. It is a film full of surprises though. The story for one – sweet young Julie falls for rapscallion carnival barker Liliom, a man who loves her but is violent, lazy, feckless and eventually meets an ugly end after taking part in a heist. He then ascends to purgatory, … Read more
CODA
CODA is the acronym for Children of Deaf Adults and the name of a movie whose subject matter might make many people pause before watching. Too worthy maybe. Sign language all over the place. Triumph over adversity mawkishness. Though it won an Oscar for Best Picture, this can be not so much a gong, more a warning bell – see Crash, Driving Miss Daisy and Around the World in 80 Days. So it’s a surprise to find what a sweet, straightforward film it is. An underdog movie that piles it on with an earth mover, it stars Emilia Jones as Ruby Rossi, the teenage fully-hearing daughter of two deaf parents, sister to a … Read more
