Popular Reviews
27 July 2015-07-27
Out in the UK This Week Clouds of Sils Maria (Artificial Eye, cert 15) Olivier Assayas follows Something in the Air, his largely autobiographical personal meditation on the aftermath of the events of May 1968, with a different type of dramatic reflexivity. Clouds of Sils Maria is a meditation on acting, performed by a trio of actors at the top of their game. Juliette Binoche, Kristen Stewart and Chloë Grace Moretz are the three, all channeling vague versions of themselves. Stewart plays the personal assistant to Binoche, an actress now about to play the older role in a remake of the punishing two-hander that made her name years before. But who to play … Read more
Azor
A Swiss banker arrives in Argentina in 1980 looking for his partner, who’s mysteriously disappeared. Writer/director Andreas Fontana’s debut feature Azor tracks the progress of Ivan de Wiel, which is anything but straightforward, in an oblique, tangential, mood-soaked almost-thriller that’s more about the journey than the destination. Being Argentina in 1980, with a military junta in charge, strict class hierarchies in place and much of the “action” (there’s almost none) taking place in dark corners of colonial hotels where seedy middle aged and old white guys swap favours, the spectre of Graham Greene arises unbidden from the shadows. Ivan de Wiel (Fabrizio Rongione) is your Greene-esque anti-hero, an old-school Swiss banker trying to … Read more
South Park: Bigger Longer & Uncut
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 2 November Lady Chatterley Trial verdict, 1960 On this day in 1960, a jury in the trial of Regina versus Penguin Books found the UK publisher not guilt of obscenity. The trial against DH Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover was brought under the provision of the Obscene Publications Act, which had only come into force the previous year and was intended to more clearly mark off pornography from works of artistic and scientific merit. And so the trial hinged on whether Lawrence’s 1928 novel did indeed possess artistic merit, or whether its litany of rude words and rude acts would tend … Read more
Dead Mail
Horror-flecked crime thriller Dead Mail suffers from the death early on of one of its main characters and it never really quite recovers from it. But it’s good anyway, just not as good as it might have been if xxxxxx (no spoilers) hadn’t bitten the dust. It’s the second feature by Joe DeBoer and Kyle McConaghy and it’s all set in the 1980s, where, in a mail room in Nowheresville, USA, various members of the postal team try to reconnect lost letters with their intended recipients. The really discombobulating ones get sent up to Jasper (Tomas Boykin), a strange man who, when not at work, lives in a flophouse. A recovered down and … Read more
Of Time and the City
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 6 July John Lennon meets Paul McCartney, 1957 On this day in 1957, a 15-year-old Paul McCartney went to a gig held after a church fete at St Peter’s Parish Church, Woolton, Liverpool. The fete had been a traditional affair, with tombola, a cake stall, games of hoop-la and a rose queen. There had also been entertainment, in the shape of a young local skiffle band called the Quarry Men – so called because most of the members were schoolboys at Quarry Bank Grammar School. The band was led by a 16-year-old John Lennon and as they set up again for … Read more
House of Darkness
Neil LaBute made his name first as a playwright then as a film-maker interested in exploring the codes of masculinity, some suddenly toxic, some still holding up OK(ish), in a culture that seemed to have moved on faster than some men were able to. In the Company of Men (1997) and Your Friends & Neighbours (1997) were his first two movies and are still sources of high-octane neat LaBute, if that’s what you’re after. He’s broadened his range and taken on gun-for-hire jobs in the interim but again and again returns to this same question of the male in trouble. Which brings us to House of Darkness, a tale of beta-male overreach enabled … Read more
Les bas-fonds aka The Lower Depths
Beautiful but basic, Jean Renoir’s 1936 movie Les bas-fonds (aka The Lower Depths) isn’t the only adaptation of Maxim Gorky’s stage play. Among many, many other people, Kurosawa did a version in 1957, sticking closer to Gorky’s 1902 original, something Renoir himself later acknowledged he himself should have done. Kurosawa’s is the better version, he reckoned. Renoir’s reason for fiddling with the story was, he said, to get around the casting of the actresss Jany Holt – who he thought was “terrible” but was forced to accept – rewriting around her to diminish her role. There is room for the experiment. Gorky’s original plot is full of people, very Russian, but it constellates … Read more
Ema
The first film I saw of Pablo Larraín’s was 2008’s Tony Manero, which was about a man whose passion in life was posing as John Travolta’s character, Tony Manero, out of Saturday Night Fever. Larraín’s interest in people pretending to be something they’re not continues in Ema, which also happens to be a film pretending to be something it’s not. Even without the late gotcha moment when both Ema and the film are upended, what we have here is a mix of character study, formal experiment and genre pastiche, served up in two separate visual flavours by DP Sergio Armstrong, his usual gauzy, alienated lighting style punctuated by moments of boiling vital colour. … Read more
Inside Llewyn Davis
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 30 June Dave Van Ronk born, 1936 On this day in 1936, one of the great nearly men of popular music was born, in Brooklyn, New York, USA, into a Catholic family who identified as Irish. Dave Van Ronk was singing in a barbershop quartet by the age of 13 but left school early to play music, hang around in Manhattan and, eventually, ship out with the Merchant Marine. He played jazz before straying upon blues, and built up a small following as one of the few white men working in the genre. And from there broadened out into folk. As … Read more
The Three Musketeers: D’Artagnan
As handsome as its star, François Civil, The Three Musketeers: D’Artagnan was shot back-to-back with its bookend companion, The Three Musketeers: Milady, a pair of old-school spirited adventures full of flashing eyes and flashing blades. I read somewhere that it’s quite tonally different from other Musketeer movies. It didn’t seem so to me. I only recently watched its century-old predecessor, 1921’s The Three Musketeers, starring Douglas Fairbanks, and that is pretty much identical to this in storyline and feel. But then all Musketeer movies tell the same story – Alexandre Dumas’s original tale must be one of the least messed about with in moviedom. D’Artagnan, the cocksure whelp from Gascony, arrives in Paris and … Read more
The Beekeeper
Jason Statham enters the territory of John Wick, Taken and The Equalizer (feel free to add your own) with The Beekeeper, a midweight actioner marked out by spectacular fight sequences and violence that’s ingenious and gloriously brutal. He plays one of those retired guys who used to be something in the secret service. They’re never regular CIA or anything so crass, these ex-operatives, but onetime members of elite squads who can eat whole SWAT teams for breakfast, even though they’re now retired, out of shape and don’t really want to swing into action. But swing into action they must once they’ve been triggered by the death of a dog, in John Wick’s case, … Read more
100 Years of… The Big Parade
King Vidor’s first name really was King. It suited him. The master of the big Hollywood movie, here he is in 1925 with The Big Parade, laying down the template for all the war movies of the future. The Big Parade is the highest-grossing silent film of all time so it would be nice if we still had the original version. But it’s been lost. Instead there’s the 1930 re-issue – same movie but with sound effects and a score added. It’s the basis of the restoration done in the 1980s, which replaced the original score with one by Carl Davis. How good the film looks. It’s fabulously sharp, in fact, apart from the … Read more
