Popular Reviews
Once Upon a Time in the West
By 1967, after countless Italian sword and sandal epics and three astonishingly successful spaghetti Westerns (A Fistful Of Dollars, A Few Dollars More and The Good, The Bad And The Ugly), director Sergio Leone was tired of men in period costume and was eager to try his hand at something more contemporary. It wasn’t to be. Paramount studios prevailed upon Leone to make one more western for them. In return they promised to fund his four-hour, four-decade overview of organised crime, Once Upon a Time in America. Leone’s fourth Western could easily have turned out to be a 90-minute contractual obligation, with Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef and whoever was available squinting hard into the … Read more
My Fair Lady
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 14 January Cecil Beaton born, 1904 On this day in 1904, Cecil Hardy Beaton was born, in Hampstead, London. This son of a timber merchant was only interested in art from a very early age. Young Beaton was taught to use a camera by his nanny, and went on to spend his life making photographs of one form or another. He studied art, history and architecture at Cambridge University though left without a degree and after a short time trying to work in his father’s business set himself up as a photographer, using his society connections to get him the sittings for … Read more
9 February 2015-02-09
Out in the UK This Week Dracula Untold (Universe, cert 15) Dracula gets the superhero treatment, bagging an origin story that places him somewhere between Batman and Superman – Batman’s damaged psyche (the Turks want to take his son) and Superman’s special powers (thanks to a “gift” from an ancient cursed beast that lives in a dark cave). It’s the story of the 15th century Romanian/Wallachian ruler Vlad the Impaler, not such a bad guy if you ask many an East European, who claim he was more bark than bite, a sentiment this film largely goes along with, until his mwah-ha-ha transformation, at least. Shot in Northern Ireland and with Game of Thrones looks, … Read more
Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 27 April Freedom Day, South Africa Today is Freedom Day in South Africa. It marks the day in 1994 when South Africa went to the polls in the first national elections open to all races. Voting lasted for three days, with people lining up patiently in long queues to take their turn and get their hand stamped in indelible ink. The African National Congress won the election, with just over 62% of the nearly 20 million votes cast, and Nelson Mandela became the country’s president, its first black leader. Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom (2013, dir: Justin Chadwick) On the … Read more
La Chienne
La Chienne. It translates as The Bitch, literally. But if it ever goes by an English title it’s usually Isn’t Life a Bitch?, which kind of misses the point. It was made by Jean Renoir in 1931 in France and then remade by Fritz Lang in Hollywood in 1945 as Scarlet Street, with Edward G Robinson and Joan Bennett in the lead roles. Here it’s Michel Simon who plays the silly old duffer, Maurice, who falls for a prostitute, without realising what she is, and is then systematically cleaned out by her and her pimp. Foolish Maurice on one side, cool, calculating Lulu making the big eyes on the other, with Dédé the … Read more
23 June 2014-06-23
Out in the UK This Week Her (EV, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) The film about the guy who falls in love with his computer’s operating system. Yes, that one, with Joaquin Phoenix as the guy, Scarlett Johansson as the voice of the OS. Spike Jonze takes this premise and has quite a lot of fun with it, working through logically how a man might fall in love with a machine: because he’s lonely, because phone sex with a computer is like phone sex with a human, because computers, like, rule our lives. And he also brilliantly details a world where this sort of event might not instantly book you a place at the funny farm. … Read more
Becoming Led Zeppelin
When Bernard MacMahon and Allison McGourty were setting out to make Becoming Led Zeppelin they didn’t realise that surviving band members Jimmy Page, Robert Plant and John Paul Jones had all seen their TV series American Epic, about roots music in the US, and were big fans. So it came as more than a surprise to them when Page, Plant and Jones readily agreed to take part in a documentary about the crucial early days of one of the most famous rock bands of all time. They’d expected the sort of blank refusal this notoriously publicity shy band generally dished out to would-be suitors. The result is in many ways a traditional documentary, … Read more
Club Zero
Movies starring Mia Wasikowska used to make waves but when Club Zero came out in 2023 it did so to little fanfare and then more or less disappeared. This seems to be the way Wasikowska would like it. After a run including Alice in Wonderland for Tim Burton, Jane Eyre for Cary Fukunaga, Crimson Peak for Guillermo Del Toro and Stoker for Park Chan-wook, she seemed to deliberately left-turn her already arthouse-adjacent career into more rarefied territory – Damsel for the Zellner brothers, The Devil All the Time for Antonio Campos and Bergman Island for Mia Hansen-Løve. That’s the niche Club Zero sits in. Written and directed by Jessica Hausner, whose films situate … Read more
Francesco
So who wants to see Mickey Rourke playing St Francis of Assisi? Not many people is the answer. Liliana Cavani’s Francesco wasn’t a box office hit when it debuted in 1989, didn’t rake in awards at the festivals and has largely disappeared without trace. But Mickey Rourke dressed in a simple brown habit as the founder of the Franciscan order of monks, isn’t that an offer too good to refuse? In flashback, it’s the story of the Italian Francis, or Francesco, told by a group of disciples who have gathered after his death to get down on paper/parchment/vellum/whatever the remarkable story of the man they had followed. As they pick over the facts … Read more
The Charge of the Light Brigade
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 28 March Crimean War escalates, 1854 On this day in 1854, Britain and France declared war against Russia. Russia and the Ottoman Empire had been at war since October the previous year, when conflict had broken out ostensibly about the rights of Christians in the Holy Land – being restricted by Muslim Ottomans and being protected by Orthodox Russian if you accept the Russians’ diplomatic rhetoric. In fact the war was about territory, the Turks being on the decline after centuries of dominance in the region, the Russians keen to continue their expansion west into Europe and particularly south to the … Read more
S-a Furat o Bombă aka A Bomb Was Stolen
The Romanian animator Ion Popescu-Gopo’s live-action film S-a Furat o Bombă (translated as A Bomb Was Stolen or They Stole the Bomb) was selected to compete for the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1962. It had very little chance of winning, since it was up against Bresson’s The Trial of Joan of Arc, Varda’s Cléo de 5 à 7, Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel, Antonioni’s L’Eclisse and Satyajit Ray’s Devi. But it was there, an achievement in itself for someone who’d never made a live-action film before. Popescu-Gopo’s animated short, Scurtă Historie (A Brief History) had won the Short Film Palme d’Or in 1957. It’s also a film without dialogue, another potential handicap, though … Read more
Design for Living
One of those pre-Code 1930s comedies that comes wrapped in an aura, Design for Living can’t live up to the sell. It’s not funny, though there is the odd smirk, nor perceptive, unless a comedy about the fickleness of women is what you’re after The aura comes virtue of the boys in the backroom. Noel Coward wrote the original play, then Ben Hecht came in and threw most of that away while working on his screen adaptation, in the process turning Coward’s urbane posh gents into a couple of impetuous workaday types – the Time Out London review called it a “tea cups to beer glasses” transformation, and that’s a neatly pithy way … Read more
