Popular Reviews
Noelle
Christmas movies. They’re churned out by TV channels, who plop a cute jumper on a couple of their botoxed, permatanned stars, add a bit of grog to a romantic plot involving the healing of a family rift – or something – and there you are, 90 minutes (perhaps 120 with adverts) of overlit fixed-grin cheer. But when a Christmas movie works – A Christmas Carol (almost any one of them) or Elf – what a glorious thing it is, catharsis without the pain. Noelle fits that bill. Borrowing heavily from Elf, it’s a feminist-lite tale of the girl who would be Christmas, Anna Kendrick playing the daughter of Santa Claus who, when the old … Read more
Obsession aka The Hidden Room
In 1948 brilliant director Edward Dmytryk left the United States in a hurry. He’d just been sentenced to prison time for failing to testify before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. One of the so-called Hollywood Ten, Dmytryk fled to the UK, where he made a couple of films before his passport ran out and he returned to the US to face the music, and jail. The first of those films was Obsession, released in the US as The Hidden Room. Dmytryk is best remembered for all-American movies like the Philip Marlowe mystery Murder, My Sweet (also known as Farewell My Lovely). Obsession isn’t as noirish as that in any sense but it is … Read more
István Szabó: Mephisto/Colonel Redl/Hanussen
A neat Blu-ray box set of some of Hungarian director István Szabó’s best – probably his best known – movies. Mephisto (1981), Colonel Redl (1985) and Hanussen (1988) all star Klaus Maria Brandauer, all three are co-written with Péter Dobai and they’re all shot by Lajos Koltai. Thematically they all deal with essentially the same issue too – personal integrity, though they come at it from different directions. To précis the plots, Mephisto is a Nazi-era tale of an actor who is “invited” to endorse the new regime in return for career success. Colonel Redl follows a traitor on his path towards sending thousands of countrymen to their deaths in the dog days … Read more
The Last One for the Road
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Don Quixote, Lost in Translation, Waiting for Godot, The Last One for the Road (aka Le città di pianura) contains elements of all, without obviously borrowing from them. A “state of Europe/Italy” comedy of sorts, it follows two drunken has-beens – smalltime criminals who are waiting for their boss Genio to show up and in the meantime are drinking themselves to a standstill. It’s funny, amused, cock-eyed, nostalgic, a little bit 1990s, a touch Tarantino, and rests entirely on the performances of Sergio Romano and Pierpaolo Capovilla as Carlobiancho and Doriano. Strange, old-fashioned names for a pair of fiftysomething archetypes who we meet utterly drunk and … Read more
The Avengers: Series 2, Episode 8 – Death of a Great Dane
We’re now eight episodes into the second series of The Avengers and change is afoot. Even before Death of a Great Dane gets underway, something clearly sets this episode apart from the ones that came before. John Dankworth’s theme music has been perked up a bit – that 1950s-influenced jazz-inflected drone was sitting increasingly at odds with the increasing jauntiness of the series, largely thanks to Patrick Macnee’s playing of the dashing John Steed. And Honor Blackman gets a co-starring credit in the titles, where her face is featured prominently. Ever since Ian Hendry left at the end of series one, Patrick Macnee’s face alone had appeared. Blackman is also noticeably sleeker, more … Read more
4 April 2016-04-04
Out This Week Tangerine (Metrodome, cert 15) A few weeks ago it was Tangerines, a blunt, austere Estonian/Georgian film about the conflict in Abkhazia. Now it’s in the singular, Tangerine, an over the top film about life in another conflict zone – on the crack-whorey streets of modern LA. The film is all shot on an iPhone 5S and shows that none of us has an excuse not to make a film any more, if that’s the way we’re claiming we’re pointing. Though director Sean Baker is so good at post-production and editing that you probably wouldn’t guess exactly how it was shot. The plot is simple yet ample – gender-transitioning street … Read more
Obex
Shut-ins of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your screens. Obex is an ingenious bit of no-fi sci-fi and if you like this sort of thing – I do – then you will be hugely entertained by Albert Birney’s film folding blocky 1980s visuals and parping ancient synths into an Albert in Wonderland story of a recluse who enters a computer game. First, though, a bit of scene-setting. This starts with the opening credits, which show real production company idents rendered in clunky 8-bit. After which we meet Conor (Birney), a supernerd who lives alone with his dog (Birney’s own dog, Dorothy). Conor’s only communication with other humans is a weekly … Read more
Snakehead
Brilliant individual moments don’t always combine to make a brilliant movie. Snakehead is a case in point. A New York crime drama with Taxi Driver levels of ambition, it’s slickly made and very well acted but just doesn’t cohere as a drama. It’s a true story, or so it says, about a young Taiwanese woman (Shuya Chang) smuggled into the USA by a snakehead (people smuggler). The journey costs her $57,000, an impossible amount to pay off, but she sets about trying to clear the debt by working her way up the criminal network run by Dai Mah (Jade Wu), Chinatown big wheel and crime queenpin. Mah has fingers in many pies and … Read more
Antarctica
Antarctica is a Booksmart-style comedy about a couple of high school girls, friends who don’t fit in, cocky and standoffish as a defence against the scorn they get from fellow schoolmates. They are not cool. They have fairly OK home lives which they think are horrible, a perfectly decent school life which they also think is horrible, and most of their woes are entirely self-generated. People refer to them as dykes, which they’re not They sound like an awful pair of entitled bitches and in real life they probably would be, but in the hands of actors Chloë Levine and newcomer Kimie Muroya they’re charm personified – it really helps that Levine and … Read more
Days of Eclipse
Aleksandr Sokurov’s 1988 movie Days of Eclipse is often bracketed as sci-fi but there are no aliens, spaceships or weird tech in it. It’s not set in the future either. But there is something distinctly unworldly about it and it’s also based on a book by the Strugatsky brothers, who wrote the story Tarkovsky repurposed for Stalker, another movie often described as sci-fi but which also doesn’t slot right into that groove. Sokurov knew Tarkovsky, who is clearly the strongest influence on this strangely meditative movie you might call a homage to his mentor. Both feature single guys in a quasi-colonial setting. In Stalker the dude is hacking his way through a post-industrial … Read more
21 January 2013-01-21
Out in the UK this week American Mary (Universal, cert 18, Blu-ray/DVD) On their way to crafting a true horror classic the rather weird Soska twins (of Dead Hooker in a Trunk fame) come up with a cracking revenger almost as surgically nasty as The Human Centipede, as gleefully over the top as Dario Argento in his pomp, with hints of 1940s noir and even a bit of Dr Phibes (or was I imagining that?). Front and centre is a great performance by Katharine Isabelle as a sexy-as-hell, cool-as-death med student out for payback. Trash hounds and body modders (they feature in the plot too) will watch this till it wears out. American … Read more
Dragged across Concrete
Dragged across Concrete is a bit of a masterpiece, an urgent, drily funny, brutal, dirty and often ugly film full of horrible people, whom we nevertheless root for because writer/director S Craig Zahler focuses on the relationships rather than the genre aspects of this admittedly big genre beast of a movie. Zahler – he’s called that by everyone, apparently (his mum too?) – has done this before. In 2015’s Bone Tomahawk he re-worked the western, switching out of what you might call Revisionist Indian mode (they’re all noble, sinned against etc) into something far less PC and much more gruesome. If you’ve seen it, I’ll just say “that scene where…” and leave it … Read more
