Popular Reviews

Gabby’s Dollhouse: The Movie

If you’re over the age of eight, Gabby’s Dollhouse: The Movie is probably not something you’ll have come across, or the Netflix show it sprang from. Its star, Laila Lockhart Kraner, probably won’t mean much to you either. Your loss? This intensely likeable, positive, bright and sunny excitement isn’t a “something for everybody” offer. But if you’re in the right demographic – the producers go as low as pre-schoolers and that seems about right – who knows? As is traditional for shows given a movie breakout, the writers send the format on holiday. So Gabby heads off with her Grandma Gigi to Cat Francisco, in Gigi’s VW Camper Van – number plate KTTY WGN – where … Read more

Almost Famous

Almost Famous follows teenage Rolling Stone wannabe William Miller (Patrick Fugit) on his trek across America as he tries to get an interview with Stillwater, a band on the verge of making it. Abba: The Movie has the same plot, but it misses out on the groupies, including “band aid” Penny Lane (the perfect Kate Hudson), the drugs (when going out to dinner was a knife, fork and stomach-pump affair), and the passive-aggressive one-upmanship of cool (“So I boned your lady. You don’t own her, maaaan” etc). Given these elements, Almost Famous could easily have been Spinal Tap, but for director Cameron Crowe’s dribbly-nosed affection for the era and its music – Yes, … Read more

Caught by the Tides

Things change and things stay the same in Caught by the Tides, Jia Zhang-ke’s experimental movie inspired by the Covid pandemic. Locked down at home with nothing to do, Jia wondered if he could put something together using unused footage shot over the years – rehearsals for movies, location scouting, technical try-outs to see how equipment worked and so on. Also in there are excerpts from three of the nine films Jia has made with his wife, and star, Zhao Tao, over the years. Unknown Pleasures (2002), Still Life (2006) and Ash Is Purest White (2018). So what we’re seeing here is a montage of stuff that was never really intended to go … Read more

Nymphomaniac: Vol. I

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 2 April Serge Gainsbourg born, 1928 On this day in 1928 Lucien Ginsburg was born, to refugees from the Russian revolution who had fled in 1917. Later, he would change his name from Ginsburg to Gainsbourg to reflect his admiration for the British landscape painter Gainsborough, and from Lucien to Serge to honour his Russian heritage. Originally intending to be a painter, Gainsbourg wound up supporting himself by playing piano in bars and so entered the world of music more by accident than design. However, once he realised he had something of a knack for chansons in the Jacques Brel style, … Read more

Natural Born Killers

Oliver Stone’s notorious film about two dim kids who kill a few people and become media celebrities takes two actors who weren’t exactly the go-to choices for crazy nutjob killer roles. Woody Harrelson was fresh from playing affable dunce Woody in Cheers and Juliette Lewis was uppermost in the mind as the daughter in Cape Fear. As it turned out the roles fit them like a second skin. As in similar gangster/road movies such as Badlands or Bonnie & Clyde, writer Quentin Tarantino and director Stone send their two fuck-ups off on a series of murders. But, unusually, they also send them off on a stylistic journey through a storm of different generic … Read more

Disclosure Day

There’s nothing lean about Steven Spielberg’s sci-fi epic Disclosure Day. Even the title has a portentous ring to it. What is it exactly that is to be disclosed? Is it a secret of the universe by any chance? Of course it is. Grandiosity to one side, Spielberg delivers an entirely enjoyable 145 minutes, in a set-the-controls-to-Spielberg kind of way. We’re here to be awed not enlightened. Every character has a backstory and an arc, as if Spielberg and co-writer David Koepp were organising a children’s birthday party rather than making a big-bucks movie, and are determined that no one is to go home empty handed. There Dr Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), a black … Read more

The Avengers: Series 2, Episode 18 – Warlock

Woo hoo, the suggestion of nudity and all sorts of pagan goings-on are all over the screen in the opening sequence of Warlock, as groovy hipsters gyrate themselves into a frenzy around a photo of… a middle aged man. All is soon explained as we join John Steed, arriving at the home of scientist Peter Neville (Alban Blakelock), where the housekeeper is as bright as a button but the man himself in a bug-eyed catatonic funk. Hooray – mind control, the big theme of The Avengers (and much 1960s cultural output) in years to come – has finally berthed, the idea being that the scientist’s mind has been somehow stolen by a group … Read more

Dark Passage

“Completely preposterous,” is how the Chicago Tribune described Dark Passage in its 1947 review. No argument here. But did Delmer Daves, who wrote the screenplay and directed this bizarre noir, simply make a bad film, or was he saying something about the latent absurdities of the genre, in particular the way fate operates in it? Humphrey Bogart plays Vincent Parry, an innocent man doing time in San Quentin for murdering his wife, who we first meet breaking out by stowing away in a garbage truck. He’s soon been picked up by a man who quickly works out who he is. Ructions follow, but Parry wins out, and is then picked up by the … Read more

Night at the Crossroads aka La Nuit du Carrefour

There are three competing theses for what went wrong with Jean Renoir’s Night at the Crossroads (aka La Nuit du Carrefour), a 1932 whodunit of the old school but with some very strange jumps, bumps, gaps, leaps of logic and filmic equivalents of handbrake turns. Number one is that Renoir was depressed while making it and so was often drunk. He simply made a mess of it. Another is that he ran out of money and so never really finished it. The third is that somewhere in the process a reel of film got lost, the one that would have gone a long way towards tying everything together. Whatever the reason, the film … Read more

The Magic Mountain

There are two versions of the 1982 adaptation of Thomas Mann’s weighty novel The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg). One is the theatrical cut, which came in at about 153 minutes. The other is the TV cut, which weighs in at an epic 312 minutes over three instalments. That’s the one I watched yesterday, all five hours and a chunk of it, having taken heed of reviews complaining about the theatrical cut’s lack of coherence. The theatrical cut is a lousy edit is the gist of the complaints. As to the full-fat version, it was easier to digest than I’d expected. I suspect the complaints about the theatrical cut are right. In the long … Read more

Valerie and Her Week of Wonders

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 4 July Lewis Carroll tells Alice Liddell a story, 1862 On this day in 1862, the British writer, mathematician, photographer and logician Charles Dodgson told a story to a small group of children on a rowing trip. The children were the Liddells, the offspring of Dean Henry Liddell of Christ Church, where Charles Dodgson was eventually to become a deacon. Prompted to write it down, according to all accounts, by the four-year-old Alice Liddell, Dodgson did so, and in November 1864 he gave her a hand-written copy of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground. Fantasy literature pioneer George MacDonald, a friend of Dodgson, … Read more

Dracula

Persistently undead, always on point, it takes more than a stake and some garlic to keep the Carpathian count in his box. This Dracula is one of several outings for the thirsty aristocrat and pretenders to his crown in recent years. As well as a recent Nosferatu, other high-profile entries on a long list include The Last Voyage of the Demeter and Renfield, not forgetting El Conde, The Vourdalak, Day Shift and Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person. In 2025 alone there were two movies called Dracula. This one, by Luc Besson – also known as Dracula: A Love Tale – and Radu Jude’s starkly mononymic Dracula. No surname required. To be honest, … Read more