Popular Reviews
Robust
Robust (Robuste in the original French) looks like it’s been made explicitly with Gérard Depardieu in mind. Writer/director Constance Meyer insists she that she wrote it for both Depardieu and co-star Déborah Lukumuena. But while Lukumuena does nothing but cover herself in glory, it’s Depardieu who’s the irreplaceable element. Because? Because it’s about an aged actor who has got a bit beyond himself. Georges (Depardieu) is unpredictable, wilful, prone to not turning up on set, prone also to making pronouncements about the state of the world – robust ones, to use the sort of adjective deployed by ageing red-faced males locked in endless combat with the pronoun-sensitive, offence-avoiding wokerati. It’s tempting, more than … Read more
Mutzenbacher
Every year the arthouse-friendly movie portal Cineuropa hands out a rake of Best Of awards. At first glance Mutzenbacher looks like an odd inclusion on its list, sitting alongside Aftersun, The Quiet Girl (my favourite), Godland, Piggy, Rimini and Eo. They are all fabulous, but they’re fabulous fictional dramas. Mutzenbacher is a documentary. And yet there is also something slyly dramatic, and possibly a touch fictional, about Ruth Beckermann’s documentary. For all its dispassionate forensic surface, Mutzenbacher does have a dramatic throughline, one that rather amusingly mimics events in the book that inspired it. Published in 1906, the novel Mutzenbacher, or Josefine Mutzenbacher, or The History of a Viennese Whore, is the supposed … Read more
Nothing But a Man
Made in 1964, in America’s Deep South – Alabama, to be precise – Nothing But a Man is, if nothing else, a remarkable document giving us an insight into the everyday lives of people on the wrong side of the racial divide at precisely the moment when the civil rights struggle was coming to some sort of a head. It would be a great film even without all that “historically important” aspect. Unusually neo-realist and quasi-documentary in style, it’s a powerful but simple boy meets girl story of a rangy guy who works on the railroad and the preacher’s daughter he falls for, much to the discombobulation of the preacher. Having ridden out the … Read more
Penny and the Pownall Case
A Rank Organisation B movie coming in at only 47 minutes, Penny and the Pownall Case is interesting for all sorts of ancillary reasons, but interesting in its own right too. The ancillaries. An early role for Christopher Lee. An early role for Diana Dors, still brunette and not yet in “British Marilyn Monroe” mode (but then in 1948 Monroe herself was still on the starting blocks). The only film directed by the curiously named Slim Hand, who was more usually one of Rank’s production managers. The first British film scored by a woman, Elisabeth Lutyens (daughter of renowned architect Edwin). Lee referred to his time on the film as a “truly grisly … Read more
The Manchurian Candidate
Thrillers generally work backwards, towards who done it or why. The Manchurian Candidate doesn’t do it that way at all. We know that something’s wrong from the opening scenes of John Frankenheimer’s chilly Cold War thriller, but we’ve no idea where everything is headed. And Frankenheimer keeps it that way until the film’s dying (literally) moments. The Day of the Jackal borrowed quite a bit of The Manchurian Candidate’s cold deliberate approach, but we always knew that the hitman in that movie was aiming to assassinate French president Charles de Gaulle. Here we know next to nothing, though early scenes make clear that a platoon of US soldiers in Korea has been abducted … Read more
Frankie
Having made films with more than a hint of the French about them – character driven, focused on metropolitan angst, loose, semi-improvised acting style, unafraid to let nothing happen – Ira Sachs finally gets almost all of the way there with Frankie, a drama set in Portugal but with plenty of French speakers in his cast. Patrice Chéreau’s 1998 drama Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train (Ceux Qui M’aiment Prendront le Train) is a close analogue, though here the central figure around which everything spins is still alive. She’s played by Isabelle Huppert as Françoise (aka Frankie), a famous actress who has called all her family together in Sintra, Portugal, for … Read more
Black Death
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 27 May Bubonic plague breaks out in California, 1907 On this day in 1907, bubonic plague broke out in California, USA. The disease had ravaged the known world twice before, first in the 6th century, the so-called Justinian plague. It then reoccurred most famously in the pandemic starting in Mongolia and spreading across Asia into Europe, killing a third of the population between 1340 and 1400, the Black Death. In the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries it had erupted frequently though less devastatingly, and even in the 20th century it was not unknown – Australia had 12 major outbreaks between 1900 … Read more
She Dies Tomorrow
Great title, She Dies Tomorrow, full of “duh duh duuuh” foreboding. It’s directed and written by Amy Seimetz and stars Katy Lyn Sheil as a woman dealing with the aftermath of an emotional break-up. She does this initially by playing Mozart’s Requiem a lot and crushing dry leaves between her fingers, as if to feel the warp and weft of life for the last time, while looking at different styles of cremation urn online and also choosing an outfit for a special occasion… like lying in a casket, maybe? The character Sheil is playing is called Amy and Seimetz herself not too long before setting out to make this movie broke up with … Read more
Act of Violence
A man arrives in a small, neat town in California. It’s a bright sunny day but he’s brought a sliver of dark, noirish New York with him on the Greyhound bus. And also a gun. As he limps across the street away from the bus station, a band plays, veterans march and flags flutter. It’s Memorial Day. Joe is in town to kill an old Army buddy. Like those implacable, remorseless creatures from It Follows, Joe relentlessly pursues his victim. To the nice house in the suburbs that his quarry, war veteran Frank, helped build. Out to the lake where Frank has gone fishing. Back to his house after Frank realises he’s being … Read more
Gabby’s Dollhouse: The Movie
If you’re over the age of eight, Gabby’s Dollhouse: The Movie is probably not something you’ll have come across, or the Netflix show it sprang from. Its star, Laila Lockhart Kraner, probably won’t mean much to you either. Your loss? This intensely likeable, positive, bright and sunny excitement isn’t a “something for everybody” offer. But if you’re in the right demographic – the producers go as low as pre-schoolers and that seems about right – who knows? As is traditional for shows given a movie breakout, the writers send the format on holiday. So Gabby heads off with her Grandma Gigi to Cat Francisco, in Gigi’s VW Camper Van – number plate KTTY WGN – where … Read more
The U.S. vs. John Lennon
Professional musician and amateur situationist John Lennon has always been an easy target for anyone wanting to level a charge of hypocrisy. “Imagine no possessions,” he sang, and the fingers started pointing at his lavish lifestyle – insert your own version of the story about the fur coats kept in a refrigerated room in the Dakota Building. David Leaf and John Scheinfeld’s documentary will provide fuel for both the haters and the idolisers, it being the story of how the US authorities revoked the chippiest man in rock’s Green Card in the 1970s, in an attempt to get this dangerous dissident out of the country. Well, that’s ostensibly what it’s about. In fact for … Read more
Ashik Kerib
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 29 April Tariq ibn-Ziyad invades Iberian peninsula, 711AD On this day in 711AD, the Muslim general Tariq ibn-Ziyad launched an attack on Spain – which was then operating under its Roman name of Hispania. He had set off from Morocco, pausing to assemble his troops on a large hill which was later named after him – Jabal Tariq (ie the mountain of Tariq) from where the name Gibraltar derives. Tariq was in cahoots with Julian, who governed the North African enclave of Ceuta, and whose daughter had been raped, so the story goes, by the Visigoth king of Hispania, Roderic. And … Read more
