Popular Reviews
Limbo
Old wine in new bottles, Limbo is a case – a jeroboam? – of the familiar served up in a starkly different way. A desert noir, an Outback noir more specifically, it’s the latest from Ivan Sen, whose Mystery Road about ten years ago opened up this territory. Now he exploits it, with a savage, scorched-earth aesthetic, in a story about a troubled cop – wrecked marriage, bit of a drug problem – rocking up in a remote Outback town to open the books on the unsolved murder of a local aborigine girl, though the nearest you get to the word “aborigine” in this film is “black fella”. Mystery Road had more or less … Read more
Last Night
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 24 February The Battle of Los Angeles, 1942 On this night in 1942, with the US at war with Japan for less than three months, air raid sirens started wailing throughout Los Angeles county. A blackout was ordered. Air raid wardens were summoned. At around 3am the Artillery Brigade began firing machine guns and anti-aircraft shells at reported aircraft. Over the next hour over 1,400 shells would be fired. At 7.21am the blackout was lifted. Several buildings had been damaged; five civilians were dead – three in car accidents, two from heart attacks. No planes were downed, or even hit, as … Read more
The Importance of Being Earnest
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 25 May Oscar Wilde convicted, 1895 Dead at the age of only 46, with possibly his best years still to come, Oscar Wilde’s life was changed by his conviction for gross indecency with men, on this day in 1895. Wilde had first gone to court after the Marquess of Queensberry, the father of his lover Lord Alfred Douglas, had left his calling card at Wilde’s club, the Albemarle, with the words, “For Oscar Wilde posing somdomite (sic)” written on it. Wilde took this as an attack on his reputation, and sued Queensberry. Queensberry, famous for laying down the rules of modern … Read more
Behind Closed Doors
Michael Oswald’s latest lid-lifting documentary, Behind Closed Doors, tells the story of ruling elites siphoning wealth off from developing countries and using it to buy high-end property in London. It is a story of familiar elements – the super rich and the London “laundromat” where dirty money is washed clean, plus an acquiescent British government and its supine crime agencies. Thanks to assiduous digging, Oswald and collaborator/writer/producer Murtaza Mehdi reveal precisely how the laundromat works and point the finger at the guilty. Not all of them – that would be a life’s work. Instead, a select few cases stand for the whole. It is, in any case, pretty much the same story every … Read more
Shoot to Kill
1947’s Shoot to Kill (aka Police Reporter) opens with a car crash. Two people dead. One is Lawrence Dale, the district attorney, the other a known gangster, Dixie Logan. The DA’s wife has somehow survived. But what were she and her husband doing in a car with Logan in the first place? From her hospital bed, and with a shimmer of flashback, injured Marian explains all to pushy reporter George “Mitch” Mitchell. Back, back we go, to when the DA was just an ambitious assistant district attorney, and Marian was starting out in his office. Soon, having proven herself to be more than a capable secretary, she is practically running Larry’s office. She … Read more
8 Minutes Idle
Anyone who has ever worked in a dead end job – data mining, stacking shelves, whatever – will get the fierce “we’re all in this together” loyalty on display in 8 Minutes Idle, a refreshingly raunchy and frequently very funny look at life at the bottom of the jobs food chain. Mark Simon Hewis’s rom-com is an adaptation of Matt Thorne’s novel based on his own time working in a call centre and stars the suddenly-everywhere Tom Hughes as Dan. This seasoned call-centre jockey divides his time between palming off angry customers, flirting with fellow headsetters Teri (Ophelia Lovibond) and Adrienne (Antonia Thomas), pranking colleagues and entertaining mild sexual fantasies about his vampish boss … Read more
The Shout
There’s nothing wrong with The Shout that a different screenplay wouldn’t fix. In front of and behind the camera it’s brilliant. But further back than that, at the conceptual stage, there’s not much beyond a spectacularly tedious allegory about something or other. Into the marriage of John Hurt’s Anthony and Susannah York’s Rachel comes a stranger, a domineering man dressed in black whose shout, he says, can rip universes apart, pulp souls, burst brains, and so on. But is Charles Crossley (Alan Bates) just a lunatic, as he appears to be? We have after all first met him at an asylum watching a very English cricket match overseen by a chief medical officer … Read more
Zizek!
The media’s love-in with “the wild man of theory”, the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek, continues with this documentary about the bear/clown himself. Starting with Zizek’s rhetorical question, “What would be my spontaneous attitude towards the Universe”, Astra Taylor’s film continues in a playful vein through a US lecture tour and ends up back in Zizek’s Ljubljana home, where he waxes philosophical from the bedroom, the kitchen, even the bathroom on whatever pops into his wildly fermenting head – Hitchcock, plastic water bottles, the state of toilets in the US. This sort of photogenic posturing explains why Zizek has become the pin-up philosopher of our time – he’s not only the most media-friendly thinker, … Read more
The Novice
Lauren Hadaway’s directorial debut, The Novice, is a bit like two other films – Black Swan (she admits the influence) and Whiplash (which she worked on as sound editor). Both are stories where extreme physical dedication borders on madness and coaching is a form of abuse. The Novice has its feet in both of those camps too, but it also has something else to say. Let’s just talk about Isabelle Fuhrman’s face first though. Composed of cubist planes and flat angles, it’s a physiognomy that the camera loves and is capable of registers of emotion that are locked off to other actors. You might remember her as the ominously creepy kid in 2009’s … Read more
The Fantastic Four: First Steps
The Fantastic Four: First Steps. The title is a joke, a reference to Marvel history and also an announcement – this, fanfare please, is the opening film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s glorious Phase Six. The joke. The Fantastic Four has taken many first steps before. It’s the failed-to-launch superhero franchise par excellence, with three damp squibs – two with Ioan Gruffudd and Jessica Alba and one with Miles Teller and Kate Mara plus assorted unremarkable FF walk-ons in other MCU movies. “Damp” may be overdoing it, but those three movies did not sweep all before them, let’s say. And then there was Roger Corman’s run at the material, with a movie in … Read more
Lola
Back to the Future meets It Happened Here in Andrew Legge’s bold and original debut feature, Lola. What did you do during lockdown? Legge got out some pre-war wind-up cameras, threaded them with black and white film and shot a Nazi-inflected found-footage time-travel epic. Mad scientists are usually male and old but Legge’s heroes (if that’s what they are) are young and female, long-limbed aristo types fashioned after the Mitford sisters and played by Stefanie Martini, as Martha, and Emma Appleton as Thomasina. In a little preamble we’re given the found-footage set-up – reels of film found in the cellar of a country house in Sussex in 2021 – before we’re supposedly presented … Read more
Mountainhead
Mountainhead is the movie for people who want more Succession but accept that Brian Cox’s Logan Roy and his vile but irresistible family are not coming back. Written and directed by Jesse Armstrong, the Succession guy, it takes a similarly vile bunch of tech bros, deposits them in a swish mountaintop mansion and follows them over a weekend of escalating mayhem as the platforms and apps that made them rich wreak havoc in the outside world. Armstrong has been telling this story – awful people being awful – for quite a while now, either comedically in TV shows like Peep Show, The Thick of It and Veep and more darkly in Succession. A … Read more
