Popular Reviews
Mank
Mank is the story, well known to film nerds, of the writing of Citizen Kane, for many the greatest film ever made. More exactly it’s two stories, one about writer Herman Mankiewicz dishing the dirt on press baron William Randolph Hearst (his model for press baron Charles Foster Kane) and his paramour Marion Davies, the other about director Orson Welles doing Mankiewicz out of a screen credit for his work. Inserted almost as an afterthought is yet another story – about the socialist Upton Sinclair and his campaign to become governor of California, and how his guns were spiked by the movie studios. Installed at a secluded cabin in the Mojave desert with … Read more
Haunters of the Silence
I got sent a link to Haunters of the Silence by its director, Tatu Heikkinen, with a nice note attached. Would I like to review it? Yes, of course, though my heart sank slightly. Not because I have anything against indie Finnish directors who have made a film for nothing ($2,000!) with friends and family taking on most of the duties (his wife, Veleda, is co-director, co-writer, co-star and cinematographer). The worry was that I wouldn’t like it and would feel obliged, out of a misplaced sense of personal integrity, to say so. Who wants to kick a struggling artist who’s just getting going? Well so much for that. I liked it! And … Read more
Shakespeare in Love
Judi Dench won an Oscar for an eight-minute on-screen performance, which in her acceptance speech even she admitted was slightly pushing it, but her Elizabeth R was the icing on a very lavish cake that reminded a lot of people that there were other ways to do romantic comedy than the prevailing models – ie Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan doing it the adult Nora Ephron way or Freddie Prinze Jr/Julia Stiles doing the high school equivalent. On second viewing the richness is even more apparent, yet what’s also clear is that the romantic element is handled with a featherlight touch, as “blocked” Bill Shakespeare (Joseph Fiennes) gets all Romeo and Juliet with a heavily … Read more
Zift
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 22 September The Bulgarian Declaration of Independence, 1908 On this day in 1908, Prince Ferdinand of Bulgaria declared his country to be independent of the Ottoman empire and a full country in its own right. Only a few years earlier Bulgaria had de facto absorbed the Ottoman province of East Rumelia as the Turkish empire, which had held so much power in the Balkans, started to lose its grip, particularly following the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78, which Turkey lost. The independence of Bulgaria was to some extent the logical progression of 1878’s Congress of Berlin, a grand border-drawing exercise carried out … Read more
Degree of Murder
“Starring Anita Pallenberg” and “Music by Brian Jones” are the big sells of Degree of Murder (Mord und Totschlag in the original German), a weird trifle from 1967 seemingly designed to showcase the almost unbearable cuteness of Pallenberg and little more. If you’re steeped in the culture of the times, no further details about these people is necessary, but if not, then Pallenberg was at the time rock chic numero uno – though Marianne Faithfull might have challenged her to the title – being the girlfriend of the founder of the Rolling Stones, Jones. Jones is harder to explain in a nutshell, though Nick Broomfield’s excellent documentary, The Stones and Brian Jones, does … Read more
Synchronic
Synchronic is Christopher Nolan knock-off fronted by a pair of decent actors – Anthony Mackie and Jamie Dornan – and directed by Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, who gave us the intelligent indie psycho-thriller The Endless. Mackie and Dornan play a pair of paramedics who start noticing that weird cases are coming their way. One badly injured man appears to be suffering from a drug overdose but also has a massive sword wound from front to back through his chest. The sword appears to be the sort of thing a conquistador might carry. Another man is lying at the bottom of a lift shaft, dismembered but with a big smile on his face. … Read more
18 May 2015-05-18
Out This Week Ex Machina (Universal, cert 15) Joining Gravity and Interstellar, as well as a host of lower budget films, Ex Machina shows we’re in a golden age of sci-fi, this film’s theme being consciousness and whether the Turing Test has been passed: that a robot has become intellectually indistinguishable from a human. Or is it the Test itself that’s being tested? Domhnall Gleeson is the geek brought in by his messianic megatech wizard boss (Oscar Isaac) to give the yay or nay, Alicia Vikander is the robot he clearly falls for the very first second he claps eyes on her – and with face, breasts and buttocks Vikander’s own, while the rest … Read more
Heading South
Charlotte Rampling often gets a free pass in films. Sometimes that’s for all the right reasons, such as her association with great directors such as Visconti, Lelouch or Ozon. Sometimes for the wrong ones – the more generalised cultural cringe before the French, with whom she’s also had a long association. The films she’s in often get the free pass too. Let’s take this drama, ostensibly something very daring about matronly white women heading to Haiti to be boned by the local black youth. There are many ways of describing this film but in all honesty it is an interminable drag and actually at its most boring while Rampling and fellow harpies (including … Read more
The Humans
The Humans started life as an Off Broadway show, won rave reviews and was soon on Broadway itself, where it won even more, picking up a Tony and a Pulitzer nomination on the way. Not bad for an old school “small” play with a cast of six and a simple, non-shocking premise – a family meets for Thanksgiving, has an evening together and then disperses. What people picked up on, and it’s also there in this screen transfer, is the subtext of shakily uncertain times, which translates into a kind of individual anxiety in its characters that’s hard to put a finger on. Jayne Houdyshell is the only one to survive the transition … Read more
Mean Streets
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 12 May Exile on Main Street released, 1972 On this day in 1972, one of the cornerstone rock albums of all time was released. Exile on Main St was the Rolling Stones’ follow-up to Sticky Fingers and the first album they had produced since extricating themselves from their contract with manager Allen Klein. The Stones had recently become tax exiles from the UK – and recorded much of the album in the south of France, at a villa Keith Richards was renting. Richards was a heavy user of heroin at the time, and his villa became a hub for visiting fellow … Read more
The White Tiger
Director Ramin Bahrani’s adaptation of Aravind Adiga’s Man Booker-winning novel The White Tiger looks at first like it’s going to be one of those “trickster” stories about a low-born person cutting a swathe through life using their natural-born smarts. When we meet him, Balram is clearly a man who has done well out of life. The White Tiger will play out in flashback, but for now Balram’s nice suit and fussy facial hair tell us all we need to know about his success in the world. How he got there is what the film is about. From poor beginnings in a dirt-poor village, where he appeared to be condemned to a life of … Read more
Aftersun
Thanks to Normal People, the BBC adaptation of Sally Rooney’s best-seller, for a while Paul Mescal was one of the most famous actors in the UK, and further afield. The world, as the Brits like to say, was his lobster. So it’s nice to see him lending his name to Aftersun, a debut movie by an unknown director, and one who’s taking risks with storytelling technique. It turns out to be a smart choice, since Charlotte Wells’s film is astonishingly well conceived and astonishingly well made. A bare-bones description: a dad and his daughter are on holiday in Turkey. Wells’s camera appears to be logging scenes from their time together as if showing … Read more
