Popular Reviews
Morbius
Is Morbius, Marvel’s tragic brooding vampire, a bad guy or good guy? The eponymous movie strings a line between two opposing conceptions of the same individual and hangs Jared Leto out to dry on it – here’s a character and a movie that’s indecisive in a deadly way. So, no, Twitter, it’s not the bad special effects or Leto’s Method acting, or anything else that’s really wrong with the film. The effects are good enough, Leto is good enough – in an “I wish I were Loki” kind of way – but everything in this film just kind of hangs, caught up on the writers’ fatal decision to be faithful to all of Morbius’s history. … Read more
Winter Kills
Nineteen years after the assassination of US President Tim Kegan in 1961, his brother learns from the lips of a dying bandaged man that the official report into who really fired the gun was wrong. I know that, says the dying man, because I was number two rifle that day, and what’s more I’ll tell you where the gun I used has been hidden. Using the murder and bits of the life and family background of President Kennedy as a template, William Richert’s 1979 drama then heads off into the undergrowth for a hack through the weeds of the improbable. Winter Kills isn’t just a conspiracy thriller but a conspiracy thriller constructed like … Read more
Woman in the Dunes
Whether you call it Woman in the Dunes, Woman OF the Dunes, or go with the original Japanese title, Suna No Onna, Hiroshi Teshigahara’s wildfire success from 1964 (arthouse wildfire – it’s relative) is surely unique in being the only absurdist erotic Japanese drama. Tarkovsky rated it as one of his top ten films, and you can see why from almost the first shot, which announces that there’s going to be less a narrative, more a poetic approach to the storytelling with an image of a boulder that in fact turns out to be – as the camera pulls back, back, back – just one among millions of grains of sand, sliding, flowing, rolling … Read more
All Quiet on the Western Front
If Netflix’s 2022 remake of All Quiet on the Western Front has done anything it’s revived interest in this 1930 original, a film more people have heard about than seen but which has been influential on generations of film-makers. It’s obvious that Kubrick borrowed heavily from it for the trench sequences in Paths of Glory, and Steven Spielberg has acknowledged its influence on Saving Private Ryan. And what a beast it is, a marvel of technical brilliance, directed with almost insane virtuosity by Lewis Milestone, who’d already made a name for himself by 1930 and would go on to direct for decades to come – he directed the original Ocean’s Eleven in 1960, for … Read more
The Iron Claw
The family is a cult and the cult a family in the films of Sean Durkin. After Martha Marcy May Marlene and The Nest, The Iron Claw continues Durkin’s excavations with a biopic of the Von Erichs, a famous wrestling clan whittled away by a tragic curse. After a quick black-and-white preamble sketching paterfamilias Fritz’s own career as a fighter who failed to win the big prizes, Durkin goes curtain-up on the era of the retired fighter’s sons, the sun-kissed 1970s and beyond. Fritz, now a ballsy uncompromising martinet of the old school, is in charge of training his boys and of the wrestling franchise they fight in. By this point the family … Read more
X-Men
The origin story of the Marvel Comics characters which, as in the original print version, struggles with the sheer number of characters. It’s a SFX-heavy titanium-shelled blockbuster that pits one team of mutants (headed by good guy Patrick Stewart) against another (bad guy Ian McKellen). Guy being the operative word – X-Men isn’t too bothered with the sexism of its source material. Take that name for starters. Men? X-Persons, surely. The men in the comic, as in this adaptation are all gutsy and have traditional masculine attributes: Professor Xavier (Stewart) has brains; Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) is a hairy brute; Cyclops (James Marsden) has nuclear-level laser sight; and as for naughty Sabretooth and Toad … Read more
The Piano Teacher
Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher came out in 2001, just about halfway through his remarkable 20-year run of films starting with 1992’s Benny’s Video, ending with 2012’s Amour and taking in Funny Games, Time of the Wolf, Hidden and The White Ribbon. All of them have a pitiless, lidless-eyed quality to them, and The Piano Teacher won all the major awards at Cannes when it was shown there. That will never happen again – the rules were changed so as to spread the love a bit wider in subsequent years. It’s an unusual film for Haneke because he didn’t write it and didn’t intend to direct it. He took on Elfriede Jelinek’s novel … Read more
Undergods
A strange and evocative film, Undergods is a portmanteau fantasy horror with the seams sanded flat and then caulked in an attempt to hide the joins. Even so, it falls into clearly discernible distinct chunks, which seemingly bear little relation to each other. First up, K and Z, a pair of post-apocalyptic dealers in humans, dead for meat, live as slaves. Then on to the story of a man whose life is invaded by a stranger, who is soon sleeping with his wife in his own home. Then on to a bedtime story told by a father to his daughter. The story itself comes next, of a “merchant” stealing a mysterious thin man’s … Read more
Tomorrow I’ll Wake Up and Scald Myself with Tea
OK, deep breath for the title alone. Tomorrow I’ll Wake Up and Scald Myself with Tea (or Zítra vstanu a oparím se cajem in the original Czech) is also conceptually the sort of film that requires a super-oxygenation session before diving in. It’s made in the 1970s but set in the 1990s, where time travel is a leisure activity that’s part of everyday life. Here, a bunch of aged Nazis who have been kept relatively youthful by the regular swallowing of anti-ageing pills plan to return to 1944, taking with them a hydrogen bomb that will allow Hitler to win the war. Got that? To that concept another one. Of two twin brothers … Read more
Gaia
Gaia is a South African horror film. Unusual enough. An eco-horror, a survivalist horror, a myco-horror and a Freudian horror too. And somehow, in among all that, it even manages a bit of old-fashioned girl-in-a-T-shirt horror titillation, a demonstration of its limber ability to play to and against horror expectations. The supreme example of this comes early on, right after we’ve met Gabi (Monique Rothman) and Winston (Anthony Oseyemi), a pair of forestry workers far from base, punting up river in a canoe, on a mission to collect data. Having lost the drone they’re using as a tech wayfinder, they separate. Expectation one – this is a bad idea. This turns out to be … Read more
The Avengers: Series 5, Episode 17 – Return of the Cybernauts
When the British Film Institute celebrated 50 Years of Emma Peel in 2015, as well as interviewing the venerable Dame Diana Rigg – halfway through her run on Game of Thrones at the time – the BFI screened two episodes of Peel-era Avengers show. Return of the Cybernauts was one (The House That Jack Built the other), chosen, presumably, because it had a big-name star in the shape of Peter Cushing in its cast, because it was something of a fan favourite and, I’m also guessing, because the production values were more polished than they had been hitherto. Because the show had been Emmy nominated, the ABC network ordered more, of which this … Read more
Co/Ma
In 2004 director Mike Figgis led a “master class”, a five day workshop in Ljubljana, Slovenia, for some of Europe’s hot, upcoming talent. Co/Ma is the result of the collaboration, a film made by the members of the course and shown to them, and a few paying members of the public, at the end of the week. Co/Ma stands for Cooperative Marxists/Collaborative Masterclass, a name that seems designed to aggravate as much as the finished product. Which is… a dog’s breakfast, if we’re being brutal. Or a deliberately tricksy film playing with postmodern tropes, if we’re not. In form it’s a documentary about a mockumentary about the making of a soap, and perhaps the … Read more
