Popular Reviews
The Invitation
Paced like a TV show with a writers room on autopilot, The Invitation behaves as if it has all the time in the world. It’s about vampires, so taking it slow, there not being any real rush, entire centuries of time to kill and all that are obviously part of the idea. But even so… couldn’t it just get a move on! It’s another case of Nathalie Emmanuel having all the gifts except the one of choosing her next project wisely. She plays the modern American miss – democratically inclined, nose-ring-sporting, open, self-reliant, struggling – who is whisked away to England to meet a long-lost branch of the family she never knew she … Read more
Aelita: Queen of Mars
Aelita became a popular name for babies born in the Soviet Union the year after this movie, Aelita: Queen of Mars, came out in 1924. Apart from the devotees of the original novel by Alexei Tolstoy, few had heard the name before, or seen anything like this movie adaptation. It was a sensation, a sci-fi movie about a journey to Mars that also addressed the state of the nation as the USSR sought to consolidate the revolution (only seven years old). There had been sci-fi movies before – 1902’s A Trip to the Moon by George Méliès’s most famously – but this was the first one out of the USSR (please correct me … Read more
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 wraps up the grungey offshoot of the Marvel Cinematic Universe with grace and style, as well as big bangs and some good jokes. There’s a touch of cinematic pathos in there too, as if GOTG3 is also to some extent saying goodbye to the big superhero movie as a cultural meme. The MCU, after all, is running out of puff. It’s the film that nearly didn’t get made in its current form. Writer/director James Gunn, very much the presiding mind in all the GOTG movies, got fired early on in the production process – some old Tweets came back to bite him – but ended up being … Read more
Trenque Lauquen
Long films are often thought to have something profound to say. I’m not sure Trenque Lauquen does, unless you’re counting what it has to say about the act or art of cinema itself. Philosophically there might not be too much going on here but artistically this is a remarkable film. Cahiers du Cinéma named this as their best film of 2023. It’s four hours and 22 minutes long, before we go any further, and a detective thriller kind of thing, opening with two men searching for a woman, then flashing back to tell the story of the missing woman and one of the men, all the while alluding even further back, to a … Read more
Holler
The precariat of America’s Rust Belt come under scrutiny in writer/director Nicole Riegel’s feature debut, Holler, a fleshing out of her short of the same name. It’s a kitchen-sinker, in most respects, which means a story set in a blue-collar/working class world where the odds are stacked against a central protagonist who may or may not get out of Dodge. Ruth is a smart girl in a town that’s falling apart. Her mother is a junkie awaiting either rehab or jail, whichever comes up first, it would seem. Her brother Blaze is clever enough to know that his sister has something he doesn’t and so it’s imperative that she go to college and … Read more
Crumb Catcher
In Crumb Catcher a doorstep salesman makes his big pitch in a revenge-of-the-nerd thriller with a comic edge, served straight-up with no messing about. Bloody and funny, it’s not bad for a debut at all, though director Chris Skotchdopole did co-write the story with Larry Fessenden (who’s also a producer), one of the stalwarts of low-budget horror. None of the relationships in it are quite right and Skotchdopole and Fessenden get us straight onto that trail with opening scenes set at the wedding of Shane (Rigo Garay) and Leah (Ella Rae Peck). A street guy, possibly the son of a gangbanger, Shane is also a writer and is currently in the middle of … Read more
The Mitchells vs the Machines
A cross-pollination of Deadpool and The Lego Movie might result in The Mitchells vs the Machines, a mad, meta-referential animation full of smart ideas and packed with enough jokes for repeat viewings. It’s refreshing, also, for a big Hollywood movie to be such a hymn (if hymns can be this busy) to weirdness. That’s largely down to co-writer/director Michael Rianda, who makes clear in the exit credits – with a big picture of his own family tagged “the real life Mitchells” – that this is a personal project. Perhaps idiosyncrasy is a better word than weirdness, let’s not get carried away, because in the telling of a story about a teenage movie-mad girl … Read more
The Avengers: Series 2, Episode 11 – Traitor in Zebra
In its heyday – Emma Peel era, shot on film, in colour, with the Laurie Johnson theme music – The Avengers became famous, notorious even, for its plots taking place in a nearly depopulated world. All very necessary, the better to maintain the suspension of disbelief – the outrageous storylines and arch characters simply wouldn’t stand up to exposure to the cold light of reality, so the theory goes. There’s nothing like that going on in the 11th broadcast episode of series two, Traitor in Zebra, which is thick with characters and stiff with “real life” situations. Patrick Macnee goes undercover as Commander Steed, a naval shrink investigating whether one of her majesty’s men (Michael … Read more
Steve Jobs The Lost Interview
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 20 December NeXT merges with Apple, 1996 On this day in 1996, Apple Computer Inc agreed a deal with Next Computer Inc to buy Next for $429 million, plus 1.5 million Apple shares. Next had been set up by Steve Jobs after he had been ousted in 1985 from Apple, the company he had co-founded in 1976. The deal involved the return of Jobs to Apple, which was seen as something of a second coming for Apple, whose fortunes had been languishing since Jobs had left (and before he had left too). The deal was brokered by Gil Amelio, who had … Read more
The Avengers: Series 6, Episode 23 – Take Me to Your Leader
Coined as a film-making term by Alfred Hitchcock collaborator Angus McPhail, the Macguffin (spell it anyway you like) is a simple plot device which doesn’t do much on its own, but acts as a string on which a number of scenes can be strung, lending an illusion of wholeness to something which, without it, would just be a jumble. Take Me to Your Leader is the Macguffin idea at its purest, the driver of an effectively brisk and noticeably slick episode of The Avengers, written by Terry Nation and directed by Robert Fuest – pretty much the A team by this stage in the proceedings. The device? A red briefcase, one that talks, … Read more
Our Last Tango aka Un Tango Más
“There will never again be another tango couple like us,” says María Nieves, best known for her long-standing partnership with Juan Carlos Copes. You’ll never have heard of the pair of them if you’re not interested in tango, but Our Last Tango (aka Un Tango Más), German Kral’s film about them, works just fine whether you’re a newbie or an aficionado of these Argentinian dancing giants, largely thanks to its emotional core. “If I could do it all again, I’d do it all the same. Everything… except being with Juan,” says María at one point. At just shy of 80 when this was made in 2015, she’s about to hang up her shoes and … Read more
Ghost Trail
Watching the struggles of Syrian refugees in Western Europe isn’t everyone’s idea of fun, so how about a spy thriller instead? That seems to be the idea behind Ghost Trail, which manages to have it both ways – the miseries of a life in exile and the thrill of the chase as its hero chases down his quarry. It’s quite John Le Carré in many respects, with the focus on a Syrian refugee who is part of a network tracking down the people who tortured and killed back in the home country. In Zoom calls with his mother, who is in the Bekaa refugee camp in Beirut, Hamid pretends that he’s in Berlin, … Read more
