Popular Reviews
Love Me Tonight
1932’s Love Me Tonight is one of the best comedy musicals of the 1930s, a light-as-air confection designed to show that the talkies, only four years into the new era of sound, could be as nimble as the silent movies, which could shoot anywhere there was light – background noise, whether from traffic, thousands of extras or the weather, not an issue. Director Rouben Mamoulian lays out this stall with his opening sequence, a “Paris wakes” dawn sequence which shifts from a workman pickaxing the cobbles on a street, to a man snoring asleep against the wall, a woman sweeping her step, a shutter creaking, a baby crying, a woodworker filing, children marching … Read more
Leto aka Summer
Edited at home in Moscow by a director under house arrest, Leto is a 2018 movie about life in the Soviet era made by a director living in “democratic” Russia. Any read-across is obviously entirely accidental. Leto means Summer in Russian but this is a spring/autumn tale of a USSR rock star called Mike, his pretty partner Natasha and new kid on the block Viktor. It’s the early 1980s, the New Wave is making inroads into the tightly patrolled Soviet music scene and Mike is adapting to the new sounds/era with a nip here, a tuck there – really he’s an old school long-haired rock guy in the mould of Ian Hunter from … Read more
Borat
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 13 October Sacha Baron Cohen born, 1971 On this day in 1971, Sacha Noam Baron Cohen was born in London, England. While studying history at Christ’s College, Cambridge, Baron Cohen started to appear on stage in productions by the university’s Amateur Dramatic Club, whose past members include the actors Rachel Weisz and Ian McKellen and the director Richard Eyre. After leaving university, Baron Cohen worked as a model and as a presenter on local TV stations, before developing a character called Kristo, a gormless TV reporter (and forerunner of Borat). By 2002 he had developed the Super Greg character, a useless … Read more
Godzilla Minus One
A country basks in the reflected glow of a single man’s redemption in Godzilla Minus One, the 33rd outing for Toho Studios’ big bellowing beast/god and a contender for best of the bunch. Writer director Takashi Yamazaki wants to tell a story of shame and salvation rather than wang on about a big lumbering beast destroying things, though that happens as well, and narrows his focus onto a Japanese kamikaze pilot in the Second World War who chokes when it comes to his big day and then struggles to come to terms with his actions, or lack of them. Godzilla is effectively that pilot’s shame incarnate – the creature arrives on the scene … Read more
Walk the Line
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 12 September Johnny Cash dies, 2003 On this day in 2003, Johnny Cash died, aged 71. A star from the mid-50s, after discharge from the army, until his death, the baritone Cash was known as a country singer though unlike many a country act he was a Christian who aligned himself with the sinners rather than the saints. Dressing in black rather than the more ostenatious garb favoured by country compadres, he was also unusual for the way he publically acknowledged the breadth of his taste – he made an album with Bob Dylan in the 1960s, his two-season TV show … Read more
1 August 2016-08-01
Out This Week Midnight Special (E One, cert 12) I’m a sucker for a deduction film, and in Midnight Special we are asked to deduce first what’s going on, and then what sort of a movie it is. This being a Jeff Nichols film, Michael Shannon is the star – as he has been in four of five Nichols films to date (Nichols’s latest, Loving, also a Shannon number, has not arrived here yet) – and he brings his brutish compassion to bear on a story that looks, at first, to be an abduction drama. Shannon, we deduce, is the abductor of a child, and on the run from the law and a religious community headed … Read more
A Serbian Film
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 08 September Stephen Dusan declares himself King of Serbia, 1331 On this day in 1331, after a brief war with his father, Stephen Dusan, aged 23, tall, handsome, intelligent and of “kingly presence”, was crowned King of All Serbian and Maritime Lands. Also known as Dusan the Mighty, the king initiated Dusan’s Code, a legal and constitutional framework of governance, later established himself Emperor of the Serbs and Greek, and went on to conquer large parts of Southern Europe. Under Stephen Dusan, Serbia became as powerful as it ever would be and acted as a bulwark against the advance of the … Read more
Black Sunday
1960’s Black Sunday (aka The Mask of Satan aka La Mascera del Demonio) is an amazingly productive film. It put a shot in the arm of the Italian horror biz – in terms of crowd-pleasing genre movies it had been mostly swords and sandals up till then. In Mario Bava it created Italy’s pre-eminent horror maestro – and this was his debut feature as director. And it also turned Barbara Steele, a Rank contract player, into an icon of the Italian horror scene. The inspiration is Nikolai Gogol’s story Viy, about a witch who can manifest either as a crone or a virgin attempting to come back to life and being prevented from … Read more
The History of Sound
Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor in a film together? Sold to that salivating wreck at the back of the room. The History of Sound has pulled off a casting coup, that’s for sure. Two of the hotmost of actors right now in the same movie. If you were to take a guess as to what sort of movie that might be – given their CVs of sexy and queer-adjacent stuff – you might go for something like a Brokeback Mountain remake. And that’s just what this is, dressed up in a different era’s clothes and with the two men committing themselves to the roles as a pair of students who meet at Boston … Read more
Waxworks
In probably the best condition it’s ever going to be seen, the Eureka Masters of Cinema 2019 restoration of Waxworks is a good 25 minutes shorter than the German original, all trace of which has disappeared. Instead, the Deutsche Kinemathek and Cineteca di Bologna took a surviving print from the British Film Institute and, using elements scavenged from around the world, put together this assemblage for a 2K restoration reinstating the original colour tinting. It’s a historically important film but also a vastly entertaining one, and if you’re a fan of German expressionism, it’s probably required viewing. The original German title, Das Wachsfigurenkabinett, is a clear nod to The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, … Read more
The Love of Jeanne Ney
The Love of Jeanne Ney is one of those torrid love stories told against a backdrop of roiling conflict. Or that’s what it looks like at the outset. But by the end it’s become more like a showcase for everything the great Austrian director Georg Wilhelm Pabst could do – all the genres in all the styles. By this point in his career, Pabst had given Greta Garbo her first starring role two years before in 1925’s Joyless Street (aka Die freudlose Gasse). Two years later he would turn Louise Brooks into a global icon with Pandora’s Box. If Jeanne Ney was a bit of bait designed to lure Hollywood into hiring him, … Read more
Daisies
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 30 July The first defenestration of Prague, 1419 Along with the Diet of Worms, the Defenestration of Prague is one of those events that make history students giggle. And as with exsanguination, which dresses up the base act of bleeding to death in a fancy Latinate term, defenestration is nothing more than throwing someone out of the window. It should be the defenestration at Prague, then, logically? Semantics to one side, the most famous defenestration of/at Prague took place in 1618, but the first time it happened was on this day in 1419, when an angry crowd led by a Hussite … Read more
