Popular Reviews
Crossfire
In 1947’s swift noirish crime drama Crossfire a bunch of Army guys in the process of being demobbed meet a guy in a bar. By the end of the evening the guy is dead. But who did it and why? Director Edward Dmytryk opens with the death happening in shadowplay against a wall, as the unfortunate Samuels (Sam Levene) is worked over in a room by two assailants we never see. Samuels goes down, the men flee, the cops arrive. The questioning starts, and it’s a strange affair, with no names being asked for by the cop, and the guy he’s questioning not surrendering any either, it’s just “this man”, “this fella”, “two … Read more
We Live in Public
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 12 November Tim Berners-Lee publishes World Wide Web proposal, 1990 On this day in 1990, Tim Berners-Lee, an employee of the European research organisation CERN, published the formal proposal to create a more efficient information management system which would connect up hypertext documents on different computers running different operating systems, to be viewed by client-server applications (ie browsers). Building on a prediction by Arthur C Clarke that satellites would allow global access via console to vast amounts of information, telephony, video conferencing and so on, Berners-Lee took practical inspiration from the Dynatext electronic book system – which used a rigorous and … Read more
Nocturne
Nocturne is a story about two sisters. Twins. Both students at an arts academy. Vivian (Madison Iseman) is off to prestigious Juilliard soon; Juliet (Sydney Sweeney) isn’t. Vivian has a hot boyfriend; Juliet doesn’t. Vivian plays tricksy pieces by the likes of Saint Saëns; Juliet sticks with safe dependable Mozart. Vivian is feisty and popular; Juliet is moody and a loner. Both seem reasonably accepting of their lot, until a fellow student commits suicide (we see her leaping from an upper floor in a pre-credits sequence), and Juliet comes into possession of a book once owned by the dead student, a book full of spooky satanic drawings with a medieval flavour. Duh, duh, … Read more
Empire of Light
Margate on the south coast of England is one of many British seaside towns that’s seen better days. So has its cinema, Wonderland, here renamed by Sam Mendes and his team as the Empire, for a story set in 1980 about people who’ve seen better days, a country too, perhaps. Britain once had an empire of its own, of course. Metaphor and symbolism hang heavy in Empire of Light and affect every aspect of it. In the opening sequences cinematographer Roger Deakins’s camera mooches balefully about the interior of this palace of plush. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s score weeps. This place isn’t in good shape. Bits are roped off, a whole floor … Read more
Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 31 July Black Tot Day, 1970 Today in 1970 was the last day on which British sailors were issued with a daily rum ration. The ration had initially been beer – much safer than water – and had been set at a gallon (4.5 litres) a day in the 16th century. But that’s a lot of beer if there are a lot of men, and so the ration became a half pint of rum in 1655, after the British had secured whole chunks of the rum-rich West Indies. Drunkenness being a problem, the half-pint ration was mixed with water 1:4 and … Read more
Cocaine Bear
As “the title is the movie” movies go, Cocaine Bear is up there with Snakes on a Plane. Plot: a large shipment of cocaine falls out of a plane and a black bear gets hold of it, tries it and likes it. It’s very moreish. Addicted, she (it’s a lady bear) is soon on a stimulant-induced rampage through the national park where she lives, in search of more of the parcel-taped bundles containing the precious white powder… and woe betide any human who gets in the way. It was just Samuel L Jackson in Snakes on a Plane but there are a whole bunch of people at the wrong end of an angry bear … Read more
Message to Love: The Isle of Wight Festival
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 17 August Woodstock ends, 1969 On this day in 1969, the Woodstock Music & Art Fair ended. Billed as “An Aquarian Exposition: 3 Days of Peace and Music” it was held at a dairy farm near White Lake, New York. 32 acts had played to 400,000 people who had paid $18 in advance ($24 at the gate). Richie Havens had been the first act on and Jimi Hendrix was the last act, playing a two hour set that included his version of the Star Spangled Banner – shocking both to those who didn’t want to hear it desecrated and to those … Read more
They Won’t Believe Me
Robert Young forever played a good guy and wound up on TV as nice doctor Marcus Welby MD. In They Won’t Believe Me he doesn’t and the film really benefits from the against-type casting. As we meet his character, Larry Ballantine, he’s in the dock in court, where his own lawyer is describing him as “heartless, shameful, sordid and cruel”. Larry is a relentlessly womanising male of the first water and he’s now in court accused of murdering his girlfriend, or is it his wife? This incredibly twisted, brilliantly dovetailing plot is about a bad man being caught out by fate, which seems to have stepped in to intervene because Larry has simply … Read more
Mischief Night
At a time when British film-makers generally are accepting the “multiculturalism rules, ok” status quo, former documentarian Penny Woolcock lights a match in a fume-filled room with an examination of life among the working classes in Leeds. Shane Meadows meets Shameless is the result, to a degree. Does that sound dull? Because the film isn’t at all. Instead Woolcock infuses her drama with a wild pantomime spirit, an unruly bawdiness that’s reflected in the set-ups, characters and dialogue. Set across a park, on one side of which live the whites, on the other the “Pakis”, the focus falls on Tina (Kelli Hollis), a local white goodtime girl with three kids by different dads, and … Read more
Best Wishes to All
What is the price of living an OK life? Best Wishes to All offers a bleak answer to a question few ever really ask. Whether it’s also a funny answer depends on how much grim you can tolerate. Takashi Shimizu, director of Ju On: The Grudge, is its producer, which might give you an inkling as to which way things are going. J-horror: the next generation. All is peace and light initially. A Japanese family eating dinner around a low table. Young parents with their parents and their daughter, who wakes up in the night to go to the bathroom and thinks she sees something – what though? – peering around a door. … Read more
Bring Her Back
Unsettling, spooky, nasty, demonic and icky, Bring Her Back is a modern horror classic demonstrating brothers Danny and Michael Philippou’s encyclopaedic knowledge of the genre, spun their own way. Their feature debut, 2022’s Talk to Me, was no flash in the pan. It takes a while to work out what’s going on but the brothers give us domestic jeopardy to chew on until all can be revealed. After their father dies unexpectedly in the shower, sibling teenagers – he older than her – are farmed out to a foster carer. Andy (Billy Barratt) is nearly 18 and in three months intends to become his almost blind stepsister’s legal guardian. All he has to … Read more
Minari
Minari is an old-school film of the sort you used to see at Sundance a lot, gentle character driven dramas full of people who were essentially decent. The sort of film Robert Redford used to direct, like Ordinary People or The Milagro Bean Field War or A River Runs Through It (which starred Brad Pitt, an exec producer here). It did well there, winning both the Grand Jury and Audience awards. In the dying days of the Donald Trump administration it asks and answers the question: who built America? The answer is immigrants, though that message is never uttered out loud. Instead we follow a Korean family who’ve moved out from the city … Read more
