Popular Reviews

Bleak House

If the film is often a novella, the TV mini-series is often the full-fat 600-pager, with Charles Dickens right up at the top of the list when it comes to cliffhanger endings to the week’s proceedings – the stories were often written for serialisation, Bleak House having appeared in 20 weekly editions of 32 pages plus illustrations. The BBC have something of a lock on Dickens, but their productions can be a bit dusty, more focused on the clothes than the action. But not this Bleak House. This 2005 outing is their best Dickens since 1994’s Martin Chuzzlewit and has the edge on its previous Bleak House, made in 1985 and starring Diana … Read more

Just My Luck

Released as its star Lindsay Lohan enters a spiral of celebrity freefall, Just My Luck is directed by Donald Petrie, who is a dab hand at turning unbelievable Hollywood nonsense into something resembling a decent movie. So he almost managed to make you forget that the undercover cop and supposed frump in Miss Congeniality was the never-less-than-hot Sandra Bullock. Or that in the romcom How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days Kate Hudson … to be honest, it’s so whimsical and borderline nasty that I’m not going to go there. Here Petrie takes the still perky screen presence of Lohan and inserts her into a similarly whimsical and borderline nasty scenario – she’s … Read more

Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)

Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised), what a treasure trove of spine-tingling musical goodies this film is. “Directed” by Questlove, whose role is really more curatorial and editorial, it’s a compendium of highlights from a series of six free concerts held on Sundays in Harlem from June to August 1969. Billed at the time as The Black Woodstock, after legendary festival which was being held upstate at around the same time. There were around 40 hours of performances recorded, and most of it has lain abandoned in a basement ever since it was shot by producer Hal Tulchin. Tulchin’s plans to get it a wider distribution came to … Read more

Stars at Noon

Once upon a time Claire Denis didn’t make genre movies. She made film you might designate broadly as dramas, or as French dramas, but most specifically as Claire Denis movies, films often with a strong emphasis on unspoken attraction (see Beau Travail, her masterpiece). But in recent years that has changed. In films like Bastards, a Get Carter-style crime drama, or High Life, a densely imagined piece of sci-fi, or Let the Sun Shine In, an ironic romance, Denis has shown she’s happy to make genre movies, as long as it’s on her terms. Which brings us to Stars at Noon, a Graham Greene-style thriller set in a shady Central American country run … Read more

Margin Call

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 6 March Alan Greenspan born, 1926 On this day in 1926, the economist Alan Greenspan was born in New York City. His father was a stockbroker and analyst but Alan initially seemed to be heading towards a career in music, studying clarinet at Juilliard, playing with Woody Herman’s band, before switching to economics. He gained a bachelor’s and a master’s in economics before becoming an analyst, then a consultant. In 1974 he was appointed by President Gerald Ford as Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. Greenspan was a member of the Group of Thirty (wise men of economics, essentially) in … Read more

Diabolik

What sort of a supervillain has his secret lair in his girlfriend’s back garden? Why not his own turf? While we’re about it, why does Diabolik – the title of the film and the name of its antihero – lift so much of its plot from Fantomas, another European masked villain? If those are the sort of questions you’re asking while watching this film then it probably isn’t working for you. A stew, a pastiche, Diabolik is bits of Bond stirred together with a sliver of The Pink Panther and then spritzed with Italian glamour. We are not here for originality, but for cars and girls, mid-century modernism and split screens, hot women … Read more

A Slight Case of Murder

One of those feelgood made-for-TV films that’s somehow managed to net a great cast as they were commuting between better paying jobs. I suspect that that’s because William H Macy is involved, David Mamet’s favourite actor being the star and the adapter of Donald Westlake’s novel about a film critic who kills his girlfriend by accident and then uses his film buffery to cover up the crime. It’s a neat conceit obviously designed to appeal to film lovers, who get double helpings when the cop on the accidental killer’s tail (Adam Arkin) also turns out to be a film buff himself. Comic noir is the prevailing tone, once the film’s initial skittishness has … Read more

Splendid Isolation

At first, Splendid Isolation, Urszula Atoniak’s latest film, looks like it’s going to be a retread of 2009’s Nothing Personal, her first one. Nothing Personal might even have been called Splendid Isolation and its MO was the same – a couple of people, a female focus, a remote location, self-sufficiency, personal histories mired in mystery, with flat grey skies and the whole thing shot on a 16mm film camera with half an eye on the picturesque. Here we start with two young women on beach. One of them appears to be rolling around in the waves on what looks like a cold day. Are they playing or have they just washed ashore? The … Read more

Black Rock

Three young women are chased around an island by three crazed ex-soldier guys in Katie Aselton’s boo-goes-there horror story which would slot nicely into the big book of feminist films if it weren’t for the gratuitous (oh come on) nudity. Not that there’s anything wrong with god-given nakedness. But back to the film. Directed by Aselton and co-written with her partner, Mark Duplass, Black Rock takes three old schoolfriends, Aselton, Lake Bell and Katie Bosworth, sends them off to a remote island they used to visit as kids, but not before pointing out that one of the three did something bad with another of the trio’s boyfriend some years back, and that the … Read more

U-571

The standard submarine drama – depth charges, beep-beep sonar, bursting bulkheads, “secure that hatch” dialogue – gets an efficient workthrough by director Jonathan Mostow, who did a lot with very little in 1997’s “who stole my wife” thriller Breakdown. He’s got a good cast here too – Matthew McConaughey putting in one of his brattish turns as the “I’m ready for command” lieutenant, Bill Paxton as his “No, you’re not” commander, an underused Harvey Keitel and Jon Bon Jovi, continuing his hopeful advance into movies – but it’s the presence of the Enigma coding machine that is the film’s USP. By which I mean it’s the presence of the Enigma machine that is the … Read more

Piggy

Lots of things do battle in Piggy, but most of all it’s a story about a teenager at war with herself. Or is it a slasher movie? Or a coming of ager with a visceral psychology at work? Bit of all three, and possibly a few more things besides. Writer/director Carlota Pereda welds all the aspects together brilliantly and in her star, Laura Galán, she has an actor who can emote in any direction. This film gets better the longer it goes on and the more we see of Galán. There is quite a lot to see. Sara (Galán) is a big girl, the daughter of a pork butcher in a small Spanish … Read more