Popular Reviews
Motherless Brooklyn
Motherless Brooklyn is the first film Ed Norton has directed since 2000’s Keeping the Faith. Oddly, considering Norton is a child of Episcopalians, that also had a connection to Catholicism – a rabbi and a priest fall for the same woman, boom boom. Here the link is the Catholic orphanage where Norton’s Lionel Essrog and his buds grew up, before being rescued by a kindly benefactor (Bruce Willis), who put them all to work in his detective agency. “Brooklyn” is what Frank (Willis) calls the motherless Lionel but let’s not worry too much about Frank since he dies in the first few minutes, providing the kicking-off point for a whodunit set on mean … Read more
Score
Score is another of those porn crossover movies from the “Golden Age of Pornography”, when the marginal moved into the mainstream and, for a while, it looked like attitudes to sex loosened by the cultural changes of the 1960s were about to be consolidated. Of course they did change – there’s more sex on the screen today, and more various sex, than there ever was before – and yet in mainstream movies (look at last year’s Barbie and Oppenheimer, or the big movies from any year) it’s like the Golden Age never really happened. Which makes the likes of Score doubly fascinating. Watching it now it’s obvious throughout that there’s a tension in … Read more
Space Is the Place
Without Space Is the Place no Black Panther? Afrofuturism on screen pretty much starts with this cosmic freak-out from Sun Ra. Made in 1972, released in 1974, Space Is the Place sets out an alternative agenda for black Americans, suggesting an imaginative future of sci-fi possibility unconstrained by the daily grind of the street hustle. The film builds theoretically out from Ra’s series of Berkeley lectures titled The Black Man in the Cosmos. With sci-fi and white guys inevitable bedfellows at the time, Ra’s lectures about the place of black people in modernity had seemed like missives from an alternate reality (actually, the future, it turned out). His film sets out with the … Read more
Run
Short, bleak and tense, Run is writer/director Scott Graham’s third feature, his third to have a single syllable title and the third to be about a person bridling against a life of limited opportunity. His previous two, Shell and Iona, were about semi-attached women, Run is about a very-married man. Finnie (Mark Stanley) is a big, permanently angry husband and father stuck in a crap job in a fish preparation plant in Fraserburgh (Graham’s home town), north west Scotland. Hating his job, he’s also resentful of his son, Kid (Anders Hayward), who’s just walked off the same job, and painfully resistant to the charms of Katie, his doting wife (Amy Manson). Both Katie … Read more
All of Us Strangers
All of Us Strangers, Andrew Haigh’s first movie since the atypical Lean On Pete, sees him back in familiar Haigh territory – with a twist. “Familiar” means an intense, almost claustrophobic, relationship-focused drama, but the twist comes from the way Haigh tells his story. It’s a spooky, old-fashioned ghost story. Not, note, a haunted house story (though there is a haunted house in it). Nor is this a horror movie, though psychological horror lurks somewhere in the background. It’s a ghost story of MR James variety, a style of storytelling that’s having a bit of a moment in UK movies right now – see Joanna Hogg’s The Eternal Daughter for something on fairly … Read more
Penda’s Fen
As far as the work of director Alan Clarke goes, Penda’s Fen is an outlier. A strange take on folk horror, it’s become something of a cult in the decades since it was first broadcast in 1974 in the BBC’s long-running Play for Today strand. Pre HBO and streaming, TV was predominantly a writer’s medium rather than a director’s. Even so, Clarke made a name for himself as a director in TV for two reasons: his focus on often punishingly gritty social-realist subject matter and his eye for talent. Prime (though relatively late) examples of this include TV features like 1979’s Scum, set inside a young offenders prison, where he gave Ray Winstone … Read more
The Marriage of Maria Braun
The first of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s “BRD Trilogy”, The Marriage of Maria Braun (aka Die Ehe der Maria Braun) is a canonical part of the New German Cinema era of the 1970s and in its key figure, Maria (Hanna Schygulla), gives us post-War Germany’s spectacular economic rebirth (die Wirtschaftswunder) distilled down into a single person. Fassbinder starts us off in the dog days of the Second World War. The first image on the screen is a portrait of Hitler, seconds later dislodged by the shock wave from a falling bomb to reveal a man and woman in the process of getting married while the world literally explodes around them. Maria and Hermann. Cut … Read more
Raya and the Last Dragon
Remember when Disney princesses just lay about in glass cases waiting to be kissed? Raya and the Last Dragon gives us the latest iteration of the new style of Disney female, joining Mulan, Merida (from Brave) and Moana in a kick-butty world of smarts where any obvious interest in looking glasses or clothes is deeply suspect. Disney love the ™ symbol but as I write Raya has not yet been made a part of the Princess Line™. She’s up there with the best of them so it can only be a matter of time. Her film has a driving story with emotional depth, a good voice cast, doesn’t overdo the cutes and there … Read more
The Man from Rome
A James Bond who takes his orders not from M but from Him? The Man from Rome is an action thriller with an ecclesiastical twist set in photogenic Italy and Spain. Interesting, even if, by the end things have bogged down so badly that there’s the distinct impression of presentee-ism. Things are still happening on screen but it’s as if spiritually everyone involved has pulled the old office trick of leaving their coat on the back of their chair and slipped away for a beer. Richard Armitage plays Quart, James Quart. No, we don’t learn his first name. Father Quart is a special operative working for the Vatican’s Institute of External Affairs, a … Read more
Shanghai Express
A train heads from Peking to Shanghai and a woman from disgrace to redemption in 1932’s Shanghai Express, the fourth collaboration between director Josef von Sternberg and star Marlene Dietrich. Another transformation is evident, of Dietrich, from the plubby Mädchen in The Blue Angel two years before to the star who’s all cheekbones and chiselled angles. This is the film that gave us the iconic image of Dietrich toplit and eyes imploringly turned heavenward. DP Lee Garmes got the credit for it and won an Oscar for this film’s spectacular lighting but Von Sternberg did almost all of it, according to Dietrich’s biography anyway. Strangely, it doesn’t look like her film at all … Read more
Quo Vadis, Aida?
Jasmila Zbanic’s powerful drama Quo Vadis, Aida?, about the Srebrenica massacre in 1995, starts with a sad irony. As the production company idents come up, and various “with the support of” and “in collaboration with” credits list all the European and international organisations involved, remember that when the events in this flm were playing out in real life actual international collaboration seemed to consist of a collective looking the other way. Ask most people, most Europeans even, what the last war in Europe was and they’ll likely refer you to Adolf Hitler. That’s to forget the Bosnian war in the aftermath of the fragmentation of Yugoslavia – familiar as a holiday destination to so … Read more
White Heat
1949’s White Heat features one of the most famous screen criminals, in one of the most famous gangster movies ever made. But was Arthur “Cody” Jarrett, the character James Cagney plays, sexually off the straight and narrow? A mother-loving gang leader prone to swooning headaches who can’t satisfy his wife – whatever else Cody is, he’s a strange kind of protagonist. But then this is the 1940s and Cody’s not meant to be likeable. This is the story of a smart but crazy criminal who, in the film’s opening scenes, murders four men as part of a raid on a train and then, as the law starts circling, admits to a lesser crime … Read more
