Popular Reviews
Hit Man
Hit Man is not really about a hit man. It’s about a guy who pretends to be one to lure potential perps into showing their hand. He’s whatever the male version of the honey trap is, and in this fictionalised retelling of the story of real-life dude Gary Johnson he is played by Glen Powell. The film is based on an article in Texas Monthly by Skip Hollandsworth. This is a good thing, since a Texas Monthly article by Hollandsworth also provided the basis of Bernie, a weird comedy of sorts starring Jack Black as a much-loved member of a smalltown community who also happened to be a real-life serial killer. Both films … Read more
Police Story
There are plenty of people who think of Jackie Chan as a brilliant martial artist who has squandered his gifts on silly comedy. Even they, the Chan purists, acknowledge the brilliance of Police Story, Chan’s best film. And now that we’re in 2013 and Chan is nudging 60 years old, he’s never going to trump it. From the opening scenes in which Chan hangs on to a double decker bus with an umbrella as it careens around Hong Kong, to the final sequence in a shopping mall during which he smashes through glass, hops from one escalator to another – not forgetting the most gob-smacking of all, the downhill drive through a shanty town … Read more
The Real Charlie Chaplin
The most significant point that the documentary The Real Charlie Chaplin makes is that Chaplin wasn’t just the most famous man in the world from an early stage in his career, he was also famous in a way that had never happened before – planet-wide recognition, mass hysteria, factories pumping out merchandise, fakes pirating his act etc. The first global star of the age of visual media, this poor boy from London found success through Hollywood in an industry he only reluctantly joined thanks to the universality of silent movies. Chaplin’s fame outlasted his film career and his mortality. Like Mickey Mouse, a silhouette is enough to identify Chaplin. The “Real” bit of the … Read more
The Avengers: Series 6, Episode 10 – Noon-Doomsday
High Noon, the 1952 movie starring Gary Cooper, is the inspiration behind this Terry Nation-scripted episode of The Avengers. Nation had done something similarly pastiche-y the previous week with Legacy of Death, an episode that leaned on 1940s noir. Quick thumbnail of High Noon – Gary Cooper is the good guy finding everyone in the town has a pressing previous engagement, leaving him to fend alone when a bad guy comes calling. An injured Steed takes his place here, his broken leg forcing him to convalesce in a very exclusive sanatorium (Brian Clemens’s farm, in fact) and finding himself increasingly isolated and vulnerable as a sworn enemy comes ever closer. The episode has … Read more
O’Horten
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 27 June Stratford Martyrs burned, 1556 On this day in 1556, one group of Christians burned another group of Christians at the stake, for being Protestants, in London, England. Eleven of them were men, two women (one of them pregnant), and all had been found guilty of heresy. Drawn from the skilled labouring classes – brewers, weaver, tailors and the like – the unlucky 13 had been brought in from the surrounding counties of Essex and Hertfordshire to London where they stood trial in an ecclesiastical court presided over by Doctor Darbyshire, representing the Bishop of London, Edmund Bonner (known as … Read more
Something to Remind Me
It’s called Toter Mann in German, the literal translation of which is Dead Man, but instead of calliing it that the distributors went with the possibly even more ironic Something to Remind Me for the English-language release of this mystery thriller, the first collaboration between writer/director Christian Petzold and actor Nina Hoss. A TV movie is how it was described in 2001 when it aired in Germany, but these days that fairly nonsensical distinction has dropped away – it’s a movie, and a highly cinematic one at that. It hasn’t got the budget of the big screen movie but the thriller genre fits the bill, as does the atmosphere, sleek and chilly. Petzold, … Read more
The Ugly Stepsister
The Ugly Stepsister (Den stygge stesøsteren) started life as a film about a woman with a talking vulva. Then writer/director Emilie Blichfeldt decided to come at the same idea – the onerous demands put on young women – by taking a second run at the Cinderella fairy tale. The resulting debut feature introduces a really gifted director to a wider audience, though the film itself could learn a lesson from Cinderella herself – it’s the dainty foot that gets into the glass slipper, not the galumphing one. It’s the same story, just slanted so we see it from the point of view of the loser – in this case Elvira (Lea Myren), the … Read more
They Made Me a Fugitive
Exactly why the 1947 crime drama They Made Me a Fugitive was renamed I Became a Criminal for its US release is something of a mystery. One is more passive, the other more active, yup, understood. But the original title is better, punchier and asks a question – who made who a criminal? Whereas the US title is kind of flappy – so you became a criminal, so what? The irony is that this British movie really wants to be an American one. It’s soaked in the stylings, characters and logic of film noir, with mean streets, a femme fatale and a slightly off-centre Mr Big at the centre of it. Though, this … Read more
Big Deal on Madonna Street
Working a gag a thousand times and in a thousand different ways, Big Deal on Madonna Street, aka Persons Unknown (a translation of its Italian title, I Soliti Ignoti) pours good-natured scorn all over the heist movie. The heist movie traditionally goes like this – a target is identified, a team is assembled and a plot is meticulously masterminded, there’s a dry run and then, finally, in the film’s big centrepiece, the heist itself, which goes like clockwork, apart from one tiny moment, when something freakish happens – a screwdriver slips, a guard varies his routine – and the entire operation is suddenly hanging by a thread. Writers Agenore Incrocci and Furio Scarpelli (known … Read more
Materialists
Celine Song’s follow-up to 2023’s Past Lives is disappointing if you’re expecting Materialists to be more of the same – exquisite slow-burn romance done with a sadist’s sense of deferred gratification. Instead Materialists is… a satire? An attempt at a takedown of When Harry Met Sally soppiness? A reckoning with Clueless, Bridget Jones or Jane Austen’s Emma, as if to atone for having, in Past Lives, made some sort of modern classic? I don’t know. Ask Song’s therapist. What, ladies – this film takes aim at women – do eligible young women want? A financially sorted guy who has his own hair and a status job (finance), it seems. Tall, tall is mentioned several … Read more
Saloum
There are a lot of interesting films coming out of Africa right now. Here’s Saloum, not perfect but pretty damn exhilarating for its first half at the very least. It’s an open homage to Tarantino putting colourful characters with unexpected skillsets into tense situations and then watching as the pinball-machine consequences play out. Congolese director Jean Luc Herbulot gives us a fascinating opening shot of a shadowy figure entering what might be a lake with a gun. What are we about to see? A western? A sci-fi movie? A war movie? A revenge drama? There are flavours of most of those in what Herbulot eventually delivers. But first let’s meet the team: a … Read more
Looking for Venera
Men are mostly lurking presences rather than characters in Looking for Venera, Norika Sefa’s film which she says is about showing the world that life in Kosovo isn’t all about poverty and exotica. Sitting in London, it looks pretty poor and exotic to me. Sefa opens with a shot of a teenage female having pounding sex with a man in the woods, observed sight unseen by another teenage female. Later we learn that the young woman having sex is Dorina (Rozafa Celaj) and the one watching is Venera (Kosovare Krasniqi). They are not friends, but after Venera pulls Dorina aside to quiz her about what she was up to on her back among … Read more
