Popular Reviews
The Avengers: Series 6, Episode 1 – The Forget-Me-Knot
Exit Diana Rigg, enter Linda Thorson. Out with the old, in with the new in The Forget-Me-Knot, a handover episode that saw Diana Rigg leave The Avengers and Linda Thorson join it. Much has been said about Thorson – a good overview can be found here at Avengers Forever – and I’m not going to add to it here, except to say that I reckon she makes the best of what looks like a very bad situation. Departing/returning showrunner (all also detailed at Avengers Forever) Brian Clemens is clearly angling to ditch her as soon as he gets his feet back under the table and throughout this series again and again brings in … Read more
Summer Window
When not co-creating, -writing and -directing the glorious Babylon Berlin TV series, Henk Handloegten likes to make films like Summer Window (Fenster zum Sommer), dramas that come front-loaded with a chunk of fantasy. The fantasy isn’t what his films are about, it’s more of a come-on, luring in the sceptical, who might find that they’ve lingered longer with his style of humane drama than they expected. In Good Bye Lenin!, which Handloegten co-wrote, the fantasy was more oblique, existing only in the mind of its East German characters, who were playing a gigantic game of make-believe with their frail mother, recently awake after a coma, in which the Berlin Wall hadn’t fallen and … Read more
The Dark End of the Street
This tantalising drama is the second film by writer/director Kevin Tran, and the second one to be called The Dark End of the Street – his first was a short and is the basis for this extended version, also, at 69 minutes, quite short. Robert Altman is at least partly the inspiration for a string of stories all set on the same suburban street and which increasingly start to coalesce. In rapid succession we meet Isaac (Michael Cyril Creighton) out walking his dog, Marney (Brooke Bloom) just home from work and shocked to discover that her cat has been killed, the Korean family over the road who are horrified at the news, Jim … Read more
It Always Rains on Sunday
There aren’t many straight arrows in the British thriller It Always Rains on Sunday. Most of its characters are schemers or chisellers, people on the make or on the take, they’re liars, crooks or worse. When the film debuted in 1947, the people of Bethnal Green, where it’s set, objected strongly to the way it depicted their community. Unconcerned, the British public went to see it in droves. Later, when it got re-released in the early 2000s, having been given a digital wash and brush-up by the British Film Institute, American critics also raved – “a masterpiece of dead-ends and might-have-beens,” said The Village Voice. “Artful and iconoclastic,” said The New Yorker. It … Read more
Master Gardener
The guy who wrote Taxi Driver is at it again. Master Gardener, as so often with Paul Schrader, is a film about human beings in need of redemption, a worthless humanity rather a wicked world. Schrader, it comes as no surprise to learn, was raised in the Calvinist Christian Reformed Church. Joel Edgerton’s Narvel Roth could almost be an older version of Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle. Roth is a guy with a complicated history – or so the alarming tattoos all over his back and chest suggest – who has put his past behind him and now leads a sedate and austere life as the head gardener on an estate owned by grande … Read more
World on a Wire
World on a Wire (Welt am Draht) is German auteur Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s only stab at sci-fi. An epic 3.5-hour behemoth, it was originally shown on TV in two parts, and starts as Fassbinder means it to go on, setting up questions about what we’re seeing in front of us. The opening shot is done on a lens so long it causes an atmospheric shimmer. The picture wobbles just a touch, as if we’re looking through a heat haze. When the people we’re seeing start speaking, their voices have the dead flat ambience of a dubbing studio. So much for atmosphere – we’re disconnected from these businessmen out on the street and entering … Read more
Le Trou
How about this for authenticity – Le Trou opens not with music or credits but with a camera pan across to a man working on a car. Noticing the camera, the man gets up and says, (translated) “Hello. My friend Jacques Becker has recreated a true story in all its detail. My story. It took place in 1947 at the La Santé prison.” The man is Jean Keraudy, who led an attempted escape from the notorious Parisian prison, and he appears as himself in Becker’s dramatisation of it, perhaps the greatest prison escape movie ever made. Becker made the movie in 1960 and was dead within weeks of finishing shooting, which did wonders for … Read more
Wah-Wah
Richard E Grant’s autobiographical book With Nails (a reference to his film debut in Withnail and I) having been something of a hit, it was probably only a matter of time before he tried his hand at directing. He’s once again in loosely autobiographical territory in this drama set in Swaziland during the late 1960s Indian summer of British colonialism. Grant dissects his cuckoo class through a “personal is political” story – the breakdown of the marriage of his own parents (played by Gabriel Byrne, Miranda Richardson) and the arrival of a new mum (Emily Watson), an American with a clearer, brasher view of matters, a woman who says what she thinks (the … Read more
Light Sleeper
Of the three “loner” films that Paul Schrader wrote, Light Sleeper gets the least love. Taxi Driver is always number one, of course, and American Gigolo is often mentioned in despatches. But ask people if they’ve seen Schrader’s 1992 drama and the answer is often an open mouth and a tilted head. It’s a pity because it’s a superb film in which Schrader gets it right both as a writer and as a director (something he doesn’t always manage). These “loners” are all night workers too – Taxi Driver’s Travis (Robert De Niro), American Gigolo’s Julian (Richard Gere) and now, in Light Sleeper, Willem Dafoe’s John, a drug dealer who works the high … Read more
Parallel Mothers
“Transgressive” is a word bandied about a fair bit when it comes to Pedro Almodóvar, but Parellel Mothers (Madres Paralelas) again shows that for him it’s a two-way street. His films are different, unusual, unconventional – yes. And yet in the relationships they portray not that far from the everyday, not that far from what we’re used to, unfrightening. At least since his international breakthrough with 1987’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, it’s been one of his main concerns to show how like the rest of us his exotic hothouse creatures actually are. They love, they laugh, they cry, they’re human. Which is particularly the case with this ripe melodrama … Read more
Kill Me Please
Sex and death go hand in hand in Anita Rocha da Silveira’s impressive feature debut, Kill Me Please (Mate-Me Por Favor) which would look like a fairly simple coming-of-ager if it weren’t for a pre-credits sequence which puts a morbid kink in everything that follows. It’s arresting in itself – a lock shot of a young woman staring straight into the camera at some nightclub, close up. The camera holds, holds, holds and she stares, stares, stares. Eventually a tear rolls down her cheek. It might be just a bad night out or something else. We never find out, because the nameless woman is soon dead, having been jumped on as she totters … Read more
Triangle of Sadness
Triangle of Sadness is Ruben Östlund’s third dance with essentially the same ideas that powered Force Majeure, his force majeure of a drama from 2014, and The Square, his Palme d’Or winner from 2017. Triangle of Sadness also won the Palme d’Or, so Cannes obviously likes Östlund’s take on role-playing and status. But first, Östlund has a little game to play. In a kind of prologue he restages the casting process for the film, with eventual-lead Harris Dickinson playing one of many male models being seen for a role in some never-specified campaign or show. To win the part ofTriangle of Sadness‘s Carl, Dickinson eventually beat out 230 contenders, so this fictional reworking … Read more
