Popular Reviews
Quai des Orfèvres
“Quai des Orfèvres” means “the cops” in France in the same way that “Scotland Yard” does in the UK. So it’s no surprise that this classic from 1947 is a crime thriller. It’s a peculiarly knotty one, directed by the masterly Henri-Georges Clouzot, who also did the adaptation, from Stanislas-André Steeman’s original novel Légitime Défense. Clouzot did not have the novel in front of him as he worked, and had not read it for years, but he took Steeman’s basic idea and fleshed it out using his own characters, getting all sorts of plot details “wrong” as he worked. The result appalled Steeman, who discovered that Clouzot and writing collaborator Jean Ferry had … Read more
Let It Snow
Let It Snow looks like a thought experiment: could we remake The Revenant, shift the action to Georgia (the country, not the US state), swap out Leo for a relatively unknown female, and bring home the whole thing on a fraction of the budget The Revenant might have spent on turmeric tea? The answer is a qualified yes. This is Ukrainian film-maker Stanislav Kapralov’s first feature and if not everything works you can’t fault his ambition. So, yes, it’s a horror movie, of sorts, or starts out looking like one at least. There’s a pre-credits sequence where a Somebody gets killed gruesomely (a blameless young girl in this case) and then post-credits Let … Read more
Weathering with You
Charming rather than gripping, Weathering with You is a bizarre mix of the everyday and the fantastical, a story set in a world where it never stops raining, unless you happen to know a “sunshine girl” who can bring the weather to a standstill. That mix – of normal and weird – will be familiar if you’ve seen any of Makoto Shinkai’s animated output, particularly his international breakthrough, Your Name, a boy/girl bodyswap romance that also featured a comet hurtling towards Planet Earth, as if a teenage male and female swapping bodies wasn’t fantastical enough. (Incidentally, thanks to that film, Shinkai now has an asteroid named after him, 55222 Makotoshinkai.) The style is … Read more
There Will Be Blood
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 15 May Standard Oil declared a monopoly, 1911 On this day in 1911, the American oil company Standard Oil was ruled to be a monopoly by the US Supreme Court. Set up only in 1870 by the industrialist John D Rockefeller and his associates, the company was efficient and focused and had grown rapidly, first becoming dominant in refining, where it used its early lead to price competitors out of the market or buy them up, before moving on to production and distribution, where it used similar tactics to squeeze out or buy out competitors. By 1882 the company was already … Read more
Drive Angry
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 7 January Nicolas Cage born, 1964 On this day in 1964, Nicolas Coppola was born. The son of a literature professor and a choreographer, Cage is the grandson of Carmine Coppola, another of whose sons is Francis Ford Coppola (which makes the director his uncle). Cage decided that trading on the family name wasn’t for him, so changed his surname to Cage, though he was happy enough to take a leg-up by taking a role in Coppola’s cult item Rumble Fish. One of the most prolific actors in Hollywood, Cage is also one of its biggest earners and alternates between what … Read more
The Deep (aka Djúpið)
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 9 December Clarence Birdseye born, 1886 On this day in 1886, one of the greats of the modern food industry was born. The man who could be considered to be the real Captain Birdseye came into the world in Brooklyn, New York, the sixth of nine children. Clarence didn’t come from a privileged background and when he grew up he struggled to pay his college fees. He ended up dropping out and in his early 20s wound up being a taxidermist, where the standing problem is how to keep the animal fresh while it’s being worked on. By the age of … Read more
Audition
The horror film has a special use for the young female body. How often does one crescendo with some girl in a tight white T shirt – if not Jessica Biel then someone pretty similar – running endlessly, screamingly away from a scaggy male assailant with a hook/axe/chainsaw/knife? Meanwhile a man with a Steadicam aimed right at the young woman’s breasts in turn runs backwards away from her, to the nodding appreciation of the largely male audience. Audition turns the tables – a sad sack of a Japanese salaryman pretends to be a producer holding auditions for a film. In reality he’s doing try-outs for something more permanent and less well paid – … Read more
Lincoln
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 29 November The Zong Massacre, 1781 On this day in 1781 the Zong massacre took place. A Liverpool slave ship called the Zong got lost on the high seas en route for Jamaica and, running low on water, decided to throw some slaves overboard. On 29 November 54 women were thrown overboard. 42 men were jettisoned on 1 December and over the next few days a further 36 slaves were thrown into the sea. A further ten slaves threw themselves overboard as a protest against the inhumane treatment of their fellows. When it arrived at Black River, Jamaica, the ship had … Read more
The Avengers: Series 2, Episode 24 – A Chorus of Frogs
A mix of the familiar and the exotic in A Chorus of Frogs, the 24th episode in the broadcast run of series two of The Avengers, and another chance for Julie Stevens’s Venus Smith to do her wide-eyed naive thing. It’s a useful character trait, since there is plenty of explicatory work to be done in an episode that kicks off with a frogman dying of the bends, before taking in a group of the dead man’s fellow divers (and, it seems, spies) called the Frogs, a large yacht that’s home to a Bond villain fattie (Eric Pohlmann) and a head-in-the-clouds scientist (Frank Gatliff) who hasn’t quite realised that the diving technology he’s … Read more
Secret Sunshine
At the beginning of 2007’s Secret Sunshine we meet a young mum whose husband has recently died. During the course of the film bad luck strikes again, or as the IMDb coyly (and rightly so) puts it, “another tragic event overturns her life”. And the woman loses her mind. What fun, you might think, a woman in a tight corner having more crap dumped on her. And yet. There is a lot to see and digest in Lee Chang-dong’s 2007 drama (which also goes by the name Miryang or even Milyang – a transliteration difference of opinion) and two brilliant performances at the centre of it. One is by Jeon Do-yeon, as Lee … Read more
23 February 2015-02-23
Out in the UK This Week Serena (StudioCanal, cert 15) After Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle, Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper clearly have decided they can do no wrong, and so overreach themselves with a Depression-era Gone with the Wind-level epic about a wilful woman and a powerful man thrust together against a backdrop of urgent social blah. Susanne Bier directs, and it’s clear that the further this highly talented Dane gets away from the boilerhouse domestic dramas she’s so good at (Brothers and After the Wedding), the bigger her films, the less powerful they become. There is a lot to like here – the mist rolling over the Smoky Mountains locations where … Read more
The Echo (El Eco)
Hardscrabble lives are what film-maker Tatiana Huezo specialises in and that’s what she gives us in The Echo (El Eco), a documentary following three families in a Mexican village, particularly the girls just coming of age and contemplating a future of mixed possibilities. A couple of years ago Huezo gave us the excellent Prayers for the Stolen, also set in Mexico, also interested in young women, a documentary-influenced fiction feature with a double shot of drug-cartel thriller to drag us along. Now back with her first love for the last in her so-called “trilogy of pain”, Huezo gives us The Echo‘s key scene early on. Montserrat Hernandez is helping her mother bathe her … Read more
